Transitioning from Commvault Tape Archives: What Are My Options?

Honestly, when dealing with petabytes of archived data, your options can feel quite limited. I played around with several third-party tools, and they just didn’t work well with Commvault. What I can say is that if you're planning storage long-term, keep backups and consider a LTO tape silo since Commvault is still one of the better options for managing large archives efficiently.

Yep, no shortcuts when it comes to moving data out of Commvault. Our approach was to assess the retention value of the data—anything that was critical for compliance was restored and transferred to object storage, while less important data stayed on tape. We treated Commvault as our last resort for reading archives until they aged out. It's a painful process when it comes to keeping the operational side healthy, especially if the support has been a bother.

You're pretty much spot on regarding your options. We faced something similar and ended up repurposing some old Dell MD1400 storage units. We restored the data and migrated it either to Rubrik for backup into Wasabi or directly to S3 Deep Glacier depending on the data type. Just keep in mind that transitioning is a bit of a project, but it can pay off in the long run.

Before making any moves, definitely crunch the numbers on storage costs. Sometimes, going for cloud solutions like Deep Glacier or Azure Archive might be better long-term compared to traditional tape systems, especially since they can lead to lower maintenance costs over time. But if you're managing large petabytes of data, sticking with an enterprise solution like Commvault or something similar may be necessary.

Transitioning from Commvault might not happen overnight, but there are manageable strategies. Keeping Commvault for older data while moving newer archives to a simpler disk or object storage system works for many. Bulk-restore of tapes is slow and costly, so focus on data that still needs to be accessed regularly when transitioning—modern solutions like Archon Data Store can provide relief from the heavy overhead of tape systems.