Product Update

What’s New in Commvault Platform Release 2022E

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
August 19, 2022
8 replies
493 views

Dave Orban
Vaulter

Non-stop innovation is the basis for our Intelligent Data Services, helping our customers solve their toughest data protection challenges with the broadest range of workload protection across data center, cloud, and edge environments, all managed with a single unified platform.

With Commvault Platform Release 2022E – our annual Long-Term Support (LTS) release – we raise the bar again. In this release we offer new ways to detect and recover from ransomware to help keep your data safe, because if you can’t protect your data, nothing else we do to manage your data matters.

In addition, as enterprise IT continues to modernize and transform, we look to make that job easier. With this release we also bring the most complete enterprise-grade protection for containers and Kubernetes than ever before, along with new ways to protect and increase performance in your Azure Cloud ecosystem. All, again, integrated into a single unified platform so that no matter how you expand or transform your environment, you can count on consistent trusted protection from Commvault.

But that’s only the beginning, read on for more highlights, check out the complete list of new features contained within Platform Release 2022E, and upgrade today!

2022E RELEASE HIGHLIGHTS

Expanded Data Protection for modernized environments, including the Azure Cloud ecosystem, and enterprise-grade Kubernetes protection

Complete Kubernetes Protection

With complete Kubernetes protection, complex applications that re-use shared resources can now be protected and recovered with confidence. This new functionality now enables:

Complete cloud-native protection for the entire Kubernetes ecosystem, including full clusters, namespaces, and ETCD & SSL cert protection
Seamless migration of Kubernetes apps between clusters, distributions, versions & storage to facilitate dev testing and lifecycle events
Cost-effective disaster recovery by replicating business-critical applications offsite for on-demand application recovery – with no long-running infrastructure required

Expanded protection for Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Table Storage

Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s fully managed, globally distributed, multi-modal database service, and is one of the most popular PaaS NoSQL databases. This release includes backup & restore capabilities for Azure Cosmos DB with Table API, and Azure Table Storage.

Use of the Table API delivers superior protection vs Azure native backups, allowing:

Greater cost optimization with deduplication and compression capabilities.
Better protection against accidental or malicious deletion with no retention limit
Ability to more easily meet compliance needs with long-term retention

New Data Protection for Couchbase

Couchbase is a leading open-source, distributed NoSQL document-oriented database, optimized for interactive applications. This release delivers new protection for Couchbase, including the following:

Lower costs with a smaller storage footprint by running incremental backups without a fully-staged backup
Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud protection with support for both on-prem and hosted IaaS deployments
Greater ability to meet compliance needs with long-term retention

Enhanced Data Security, including additional capabilities for early detection of and simplified recovery from ransomware attacks and other anomalous activity

File Type Anomaly Detection

Deeper insights yield better detection and faster responses to potential threats to your data. New File Type Anomaly Detection functionality provides:

Greater insights to unauthorized activity and file changes to better determine if data has been compromised
Improved incident response with immediate alerting of suspicious activity
Automatic, efficient data recovery using clean versions from unaffected backups

CBT Support for Azure Disk Encryption

Until recently, customers could not use Change Block Tracking (CBT) with managed encrypted virtual disks, forcing a trade-off between security and performance. Now, with Microsoft’s recent extension of their API, CBT can be used with both un-managed and managed encrypted virtual disks – and we’ve included this capability in this platform release. With CBT Support for Azure Disk Encryption, customers can:

Save time and lower costs while enhancing security
Enhance backup performance of virtual disks
Gain both security and performance for VMs using managed disks with Azure Disk Encryption

Greater data resiliency and improved cost management through Data Transformation, with expanded disaster recovery capabilities for hybrid and multi-cloud environments

AWS to Azure Cross-Cloud Replication and Recovery

Delivering true multi-cloud disaster recovery to help ensure business continuity, AWS to Azure Cross-Cloud Replication and Recovery brings with it the following benefits:

Enable business continuity with multi-cloud disaster recovery for AWS workloads
Limit risks and exposure by going beyond a single public cloud vendor
Help ensure workload mobility for migration or application placement, whether temporary or long-term

Azure Stack to Azure Replication & Disaster Recovery

With this new functionality, Azure Stack customers can now leverage Azure for replication and disaster recovery in implementing their hybrid cloud strategy. This enables customers to:

Simplify your hybrid cloud strategy with DR and application mobility across Azure Stack and Azure deployments
Improve RPO/RTO over standard backup Service Level Objectives
Easily configure, manage, and monitor through existing Replication Group administration within Commvault Command Center

Warm Site Replication

This new replication option allows periodic replication for lower-priority workloads with moderate disaster recovery needs, delivering the ability to:

Prioritize DR strategy toward workloads requiring faster RTOs
Lower costs by reducing standby infrastructure expenses at the recovery site
Simplify management and optimize cloud usage by reducing DR cloud footprint

Looking for more info about Commvault Platform Release 2022E? Click the “Subscribe” button for the Commvault Platform Release updates section of this community to receive notifications when new topics and updates are posted. Ask questions about the releases and suggest future topics you’d like to know more about here too.

Look here for the complete list of all new features and functionality contained within Platform Release 2022E.

+20

Onno van den Berg
Commvault Certified Expert
Forum|Forum|3 years ago
August 21, 2022

@Dave Orban thanks for this detailed overview! noticed some new capabilities like Couchbase who are missing on the what's new section that is part of the documentation. also if I recall correctly existing customers leveraging Kubernetes protection should consider moving to this release soon, because the underlying foundation has been enhanced making it more robust which should result in an improved user experience, right?

+20

Onno van den Berg
Commvault Certified Expert
Forum|Forum|3 years ago
August 21, 2022

Also it might be worth mentioning that the featured videos can be found here: https://commvaultondemand.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ODLL/pages/2367422465/Commvault+Platform+Release+2022E+-+Key+Feature+Review+Videos

Dave Orban
Author
Vaulter
Forum|Forum|3 years ago
August 22, 2022

Current customers should absolutely upgrade. This is, of course, a Long-Term Support release, which tends to be the necessary incentive required to get our customers to upgrade, so we’re anticipating that many - if not most - will indeed upgrade.

DZO

George
Byte
Forum|Forum|3 years ago
October 11, 2022

Dumb question: Why the new versioning/numbering out of the blue? Last I heard it was 11.28. Now looks like that logical development versioning is being cast aside for the marketing concept using century-decade-year + letter naming convention (2022E)?

+20

Onno van den Berg
Commvault Certified Expert
Forum|Forum|3 years ago
October 11, 2022

Hi @George! See the following post for the explanation:

Dave Orban
Author
Vaulter
Forum|Forum|3 years ago
October 11, 2022

Beginning with our current release – formerly known as 11.28 – that became Generally Available in August 2022 – we made a decision to utilize a new naming convention – Platform Release – and are utilizing the suffix “E” to denote Extended Support… in essence, Long-term Support. By adding the year to the release name, we believe it will make it easier for Commvault users to know exactly how up-to-date their Commvault deployment is, along with knowing whether or not the release will receive Extended Support. We also changed the release frequency from once-per-quarter to a twice-yearly cadence, which will enable more time for development, while enabling Commvault users to make updates less frequently.

DZO

George
Byte
Forum|Forum|3 years ago
October 11, 2022

LOL

Monkey business with the version numbering while maintaining the original version numbering is just busy work. A solution in search of a problem… When 2024 arrives, I predict the next marketing vision will change this again.

What will future platform release names look like?

Each release will be called a Commvault Platform Release, followed by the calendar year of the GA date of the release, and appended with an ‘E’ if the release is an Extended Support release. So, while the 2022 mid-year release is called Commvault Platform Release 2022E, the next release, which will have General Availability in February 2023 (and will not be an Extended Support release), will be called Commvault Platform Release 2023. The pattern will then continue after that, with Commvault Platform Release 2023E becoming available in mid-2023, and so on.

Will the old FR 11.XX names be going away completely?

No. While we won’t be promoting the old FR 11.XX names, we will still maintain them, and they will be visible in both the product and in our online documentation.

+20

Onno van den Berg
Commvault Certified Expert
Forum|Forum|3 years ago
October 11, 2022

Well until know we can't look into the crystal ball so you might be right, but given the fact that they changed the rhythm from four release per year to two releases per year it already introduced a shift and change and I find it pretty logical that they also decided to change the versioning of the product. In the end it just a number but FR35 doesn't say anything other than that it's version FR35. For the new naming it's immediately clear that the version was release in year X and if it was the long-term supported version or not.