Commvault rolled out portfolio updates today during its 2020 FutureReady virtual event including a new version of its HyperScale X scale-out storage appliance, which is now fully integrated with its recently launched Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform for Kubernetes. 

“To truly solve hard problems,” Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani said during his keynote address, “products, people, and partners must come together.” 

HyperScale X brings all three together for storage and data management in a single appliance that Mirchandani says will simplify and accelerate the move to hybrid cloud, containers, and virtualized environments.  

Commvault has been a big player in the data protection and storage management markets for quite some time. As a veteran in the industry, the company's traditional backup products have gained a bit of a reputation for being complex. 

Just within the last year, however, Commvault has undergone a reformation of sorts, repositioning its products to favor simplicity and flexibility in alignment with the market’s demand for interoperability as multi- and hybrid-cloud environments continue to gain momentum. 

To this end, Commvault paid $225 million last September to acquire software-defined storage startup Hedvig. The deal helped Commvault unify storage and data management and remedy data fragmentation for businesses.

Following on the heels of the Hedvig purchase, the company launched Metallic Backup, a consumption-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) backup product engineered for the Commvault’s most requested use cases: firms with up to 2,500 employees.

The launch of HyperScale X marks the first integration of the acquired Hedvig technology into Commvault’s storage portfolio.

The new product uses Hedvig’s distributed storage platform, which deploys in standard commodity servers, aggregates the capacity across servers, and exposes it to applications as a standard tool. HyperScale X is designed to deliver scalability, security, and resiliency as organizations move to hybrid cloud, container, and virtualized environments, the company said. 

Mirchandani called simplicity the “guiding principle” in today’s announcements. “The cloud has completely changed the landscape. Yesterday's patchwork of solutions to manage large data sets are not a natural fit for what customers need today.” Through the Commvault Command Center HyperScale X dashboard, organizations can now monitor all HyperScale-specific storage from a single central console.

“I think we can confidently say at this point that it’s just a matter of when, not if, containers are going to become mainstream,” said Manoj Nair, GM of Metallic during the keynote. 

Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform for Kubernetes is Commvault’s storage service for companies that run the Kubernetes container orchestration software in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It supports multiple storage types and provides users with a centralized console to manage different cloud data storage infrastructures.

Commvault also added snapshot support for data migration across Hedvig clusters. This automates protection of stateful workloads and enables users to move these workloads across development platforms whether that be region to region, cloud to cloud, or cloud to on-premises. 

A newly added native API enables flexibility to develop and run applications with encryption and third-party Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) support to improve data security in any Kubernetes environment. 

“With the new container features for Hedvig, focused on Kubernetes support, Commvault is enabling customers to speed DevOps and apply Commvault’s data management capabilities, such as migration and disaster recovery, to containerized environments. These updates to Hedvig make it an intelligent and comprehensive solution for Kubernetes,” said Phil Goodwin, research director, IDC, in a prepared statement.