Cost involved for CommVault 1

[DJCopa]

Hello.

I'm in the process of getting a proposal together for CommVault Galaxy Backup and Restore. I have seen it in action at the Storage Expo, and have heard some very good things about it.
Before the company goes any further, we wanted to know a rough estimate of costings involved in the basic product. I know this is a pretty vague question, but a ball park figure for the standard package to back up 8 servers would be a great help. I don't really want to start talking to suppliers if the figure is out of our league.

Hope you can help.

Thanks.

 

[birky]

Hi

Obviously there are many things to factor in when working out a price for an enterprise level backup solution such as Galaxy.

If we take the base for your environment as being 8 Windows clients backing up to a tape library with a single drive you would need;-

1 x CommServe (1 cpu), 1 x Media Agent(1 cpu), 8 x Windows iDAs (1 to 7 cpu).

The Media Agent would include licenses for 1 x tape library and 1 x tape drive.

The costs for the software piece for this (this is approximate ) would be around 4500k and then you would have the support bit on top and installation from who you buy it from ....rough figure off top of my head would be around 6500k including installation.

These 'rough' figures would be just for a basic tape backup solution, there would be an extra license required if you were wanting to back up to disk....starts around £500 for 800Gb.

Remember though, when you have implemented the base solution for Galaxy then it is very to implement other areas as well such as HSM and Email Archiving....I've also heard on the grapevine that theres some kind of replication facility coming through in the next version.

You can find more info at pinnacldata.co.uk if you need more info/prices for your proposal




PinnacleData Systems Ltd (UK)

 

[DJCopa]

Cheers fro the quick response Birky.

We currently have a seperate DAT/DLT drive for each server, so i suppose we would need a seperate media license for each? My understanding is that these seperate drives can be seen as 1 large drive by CommVault to back up the servers. Therefore, if one drive overuns, the job will continue on another - Does this sound right?

A ball park figure of about £6k sounds good - Thanks for your help on this.

 

[art15t]

Hi DJCopa,

You'll need a media agent for each host that controls the tape or library, of course once the library is configured you can amalgamate several devices into a pool. This gives you what appears to be one "large" library and backups that use that storage policy/pool will just pick up an available drive from the pool. Don't forget to think about network interfaces and the infrastructure you'll need to move large volumes of data across the net. Make absolutely sure everything is running at the same speed/duplex(Gbit is the norm) or performance will be very slow.

I'm not familiar with costings but I'd suggest you have at least one magnet library(disk) configured for your indexes and auxilary copies. In comparison to Netbackup CommVault is much cheaper but having worked with both solutions I can say without exception that Netbackup leaves CommVault standing. That's not to say that CommVault aren't hot on the heels of Veritas but I believe it will be some time yet before the product comes up to scratch. I suspect that when it does the pricing won't be much difference!

 

[birky]

Hi DJ

To be honest with you if you are moving to CommVault then I would look at either implementing disk for your primary storage and then using the auxiliary copy function within Galaxy to copy your backups from disk to tape.

Ths would save you money overall and give you faster backups/ restores as your primary would be disk for recent data and any older data would be retrieved from tape.

Or an alternative would be to scsi attach a small autoloader onto the back of your Media Agent server and allow all the backups to go to one tape library.

Good vendors for disk are NexSan.

I too have used, in both an administrator and consultant role, Netbackup and CommVault (also Legato) and have to say that I disagree with art15t's view in that NBU leaves CV standing.....there are many huge advantages to using CV over NBU but, each to his own ;-)


PinnacleData Systems Ltd (UK)

 

[DJCopa]

Thanks for both your comments. I'm still inclined to look down the CommVault route, but as you both say it is down to personal preference.
I like the idea of an autoloader - Seems sensible.
With regards to backing up to disk, this was another reason for looking at CommVault. I will have a look at NexSan.

Thanks again for all your on this post - It's certainly given me some thoughts on how to progress this.

 

[Osotogari]

Both galaxy and NBU are good... each has it's place in the market. I believe galaxy is easier to use but you can tailor NBU more to your organization. If you're going to install only one Commcell/Master server I would go with Commvault Galaxy. Commvault is easier to use but lacks the troubleshooting that NBU software provides... We can pro and con these two throwing "if" everywhere... Agreed, to each his own.