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Question

Switching from on-premises backup storage to AWS S3

  • February 24, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 27 views
T
Challenger
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Hello everyone,

I have a question.

Since we don't want to renew our maintenance contract for our on-premises backup storage, we're now wondering whether we can run the entire backup data set, which is 89 TB, on AWS S3. Has anyone had any experience with this? What about read accesses during data verification and data aging? What kind of costs should we expect? Commvault mentions a value of 20 TB for data verification jobs, for example. However, I don't think that's realistic, since the data verification job only reads blocks. To reduce read costs from S3, there's supposedly the option of deploying a media agent in AWS to eliminate these costs. Does anyone have any experience with this?

I'd like to get a rough idea of ​​the ongoing costs we can expect if we were to go this route.

I would really appreciate any feedback.

Regards, 
Thomas

3 replies

Sureshkumar S
Vaulter
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Hi ​@thomas.S ,

Good day!

  • Yes, you can safely and reliably store very large backup datasets on Amazon AWS without any technical limitations.

  • To keep ongoing costs low, it is strongly recommended to deploy a Commvault MediaAgent as an EC2 instance in the same AWS region as the S3 bucket.

  • With the MediaAgent running inside AWS, all backup, restore, data verification, and data aging activities stay within the AWS network, which eliminates data download (egress) charges.

  • Data verification and data aging do generate read (GET) requests against S3, but when these reads are performed from within the same AWS region, no egress costs are incurred.

  • During verification, Commvault does not scan the entire backup dataset. Only the required data blocks are checked, and deduplication further minimizes how much data needs to be read.

  • This design ensures predictable costs, efficient operations, and avoids unexpected cloud charges while maintaining data integrity and reliability.

Regards,

Sureshkumar S

 

T
Challenger
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  • thomas.SChallenger
  • Author
  • Challenger
  • February 25, 2026

Hello ​@Sureshkumar S, 

thank you for the information.

If we run a Media Agent as an EC2 instance, we can also remove the Media Agents from the backup storage. Is that correct? (Of course, assuming the retention period for the on-premises backups has expired.)

Regards, 
Thomas

Sureshkumar S
Vaulter
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Hi ​@thomas.S ,

Yes you can remove once the jobs are aged 

 

Regards,

Sureshkumar S

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