Metallic comes as three offerings: Metallic for Office 365, which protects Sharepoint, Exchange, OneDrive, Teams and so on; Metallic for Endpoints, which protects desktops and laptops, including Apple Mac hardware; and Metallic core, which allows customers to back up workloads to the cloud, but also store active copies on-site locally for quicker recovery.
Core customers can also use their own Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure cloud storage as a backup target. Metallic for Office 365 and Metallic for Endpoints also come with the option of an e-discovery edition for those needing enhanced legal search-type functionality.
Metallic’s Office 365 functionality means it can operate as a cloud-to-cloud backup product. That’s an emerging category driven by customer needs for more comprehensive backup capability than is offered in cloud providers’ products natively.
Metallic offers backup as a service with single-pane-of-glass management across on-premise, public cloud and hybrid workloads.
Potential customers can sign up to the service rapidly via the Metallic.io website. Commvault also works with independent software vendor (ISV) partners that offer the service to customers.
According to Commvault sales engineering leader John Day, customers can be up-and-running on Metallic within 15 minutes. But that would exclude uploads of existing data, the time for which would depend on how much data needed to be moved to the cloud.
“Metallic can help reduce time to value. Customers can just switch it on and don’t have to build a backup infrastructure themselves” John Day, Commvault
Pricing depends on the product. For Office 365 and Endpoint, it is based on the number of users. With Core, charges are for “front-end data”, meaning unique data that passes through Metallic backup processes. The amount charged increases as the volume of data backed up increases. There are no ingress and egress charges.
According to Day, Metallic and backup as a service fit well with customers that are increasingly looking for agile solutions as they develop web-centric applications.
“Customers are looking to rapidly pivot their businesses and be more agile. We see this as a huge potential win for customers while maintaining compliant backup procedures,” he said.
“Metallic can help reduce time to value. Customers can just switch it on and don’t have to build a backup infrastructure themselves. The SaaS model is hugely beneficial to customers in that sense.”
The Metallic service will be available in the UK, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden. The service was first launched a year ago in the US and other regions.
