Solution Discovery

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Solution Discovery
COMMVAULT PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL – FOR COMMVAULT PARTNERS UNDER NDA USE – NOT TO BE FURTHER DISTRIBUTED
Solution Discovery
Solution
Discovery
FOR
FORSALES
SALESENGINEERS
ENGINEERS
Presented
Presentedby
by
COMMVAULT
COMMVAULT
Copyright © 2022 Commvault | All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2022 Commvault | All Rights Reserved
COMMVAULT CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY. INTERNAL AND PARTNER UNDER NDA USE ONLY.
COMMVAULT CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY. INTERNAL AND PARTNER UNDER NDA USE ONLY.
Notes:
Welcome to the “Solution Discovery” module, presented by Commvault®.

For your information, a PDF version of this e-learning module can be downloaded by clicking on the
resources link in the top right-hand corner of the training window.
commvault.com | 888.746.3849
©1999-2023 Commvault Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Commvault, Commvault and logo, the “C hexagon” logo, and “Be ready” are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Commvault Systems, Inc. A complete list of trademarks owned by Commvault can be found here. All other third party brands, product names, and
trademarks are the property of and used to identify the products or services of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change without notice.
Learning Goals
Learning Goals
1. Understand
the typical processes that a sales engineer
must perform to achieve a successful
Commvault® presales design
2. Learn
what information to collect about a customer
environment
3. Understand
why data profiling is important to the overall
design process and how it is utilized to
categorize customer data
4. Leverage
that information to interpret data
protection requirements and SLAs
COMMVAULT CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY. INTERNAL AND PARTNER UNDER NDA USE ONLY. Copyright © 2022 Commvault | All Rights Reserved 2
Notes:
This module focuses on the key processes needed to design a Commvault® Environment. This
includes gathering relevant customer information, data profiling and further using the information
gathered to interpret data protection requirements.
Commvault Solution Design Process
Notes:
Before we talk about solution discovery, let me provide you with a baseline process for your solution
proposals and designs based on Commvault® software.
One, This might sound obvious, but you would be amazed by how often it gets overlooked or
completely lost in a project. Before any technology or sizing, or pricing or anything else for that matter
gets discussed… Always remember to start with the end goal in mind. What should the final solution
achieve for my customer? More specifically What are the project requirements and what are the
desired outcomes? Remember to refer to these points throughout the engagement – I guarantee the
outcome will be more successful if you do.
Two, Discover and collect information .. Knowledge is power and we are going to talk more about
discovery during this module.
Three, Discuss the backup strategy as it relates to the various Commvault® software agents and
features. As equally or if not more important than this, discuss the recovery strategy. Think about it,
the customers SLAs and recovery requirements should shape the backup strategy and not the other
way around.
Four, Review all the information that you have collected so far, and ask for additional information or
clarification if required.
And Five, Time to start the design and meet those solution objectives. This training follows a logical
order that should closely match with your actual design process. It will cover Solution discovery, plans,
placement and sizing of components in both the data and control planes, connectivity and
communication, security, and more.
Environment Overview and Data Profiling
Environment Overview and Data Profiling
• An Environment overview provides a high-

level view of the physical infrastructure and
logical connectivity.
• Networking, Security, Location, Users,
Connectivity
• Data profiling categorizes customer data by Placement of infrastructure
type and other criteria.

• Type
• SLA
• Location
• Size
• Retention Sizing of infrastructure
Notes:
An important initial phase of any Commvault® design is to get an overview of the customer
environment and establish their various data profiles.
An environment overview will primarily help you to visualize the overall physical and logical
infrastructure in order to establish the overarching design potential in addition to the design
constraints. You can even ask the customer if they have a visio or pdf of their current infrastructure.
Not only does the customer sharing a diagram show a level of trust but the icons that they use might
give you a view into who their primary vendors are. If they don't have a diagram, offer to help build
one for the data protection architecture.
A Data profile categorizes a data-set that shares the same or a very similar, set of criteria. We will
discuss some sample data profiles in the coming slides, but for the sake of an introduction, a simple
profile would define criteria such as the data type, SLA, its location, size and retention requirement.
Establishing an Environment Overview and the Data profiles is an important discovery exercise as it
sets-up the next phases of your solution architecture, helping you to determine where to place core
Commvault® infrastructure components, how to size them, and how they will connect and
communicate with the system
As you will learn shortly, these tasks also help establish data protection Plans, which relate directly to
how each set of data should be managed under Commvault®.
Discover and Collect
Notes:
To establish an environment overview and perform data profiling it is highly likely that you will
need to undertake a data discovery exercise with the customer. Every Sales Engineer will have
their own preferences for performing discovery and capturing information for their design. Some
typical examples are simple questioning and note taking, email communication, some kind of
data capture form or document, a formal workshop, a whiteboard session… it’s really up to you.
Another interesting avenue to explore, is to request information from their current data protection
solution This solution will likely have processed much of their data before and can be useful to
validate any figures provided by the customer. Some words of caution when using this information
though as reporting varies greatly across vendors, for example, you may be looking at cumulative
figures captured over a certain time period, rather than a single full backup.
Environment Overview
Notes:
Rather than asking a customer to describe their whole environment, begin your discovery with
some simple, targeted questions. There really is no such thing as a “typical environment” but let’s
look at an example nonetheless, you will be able to follow a similar process regardless of the
environment you are faced with. Start by asking the customer how many sites exist within their
environment. In this case, a site would be any location where data needs to be protected, where
protected data will reside, and where data needs to be accessed.
In this example we have an active or primary data center environment that hosts any kind of
production workload. This could be a company head quarters, a rented data centre, or even hosted
with a service provider.
At this point it is worthwhile understanding what type of data center services need protecting at
the site. For example, Databases and Applications (including custom applications), File Servers
(including NAS), ERP, CRM, Web applications, mainframes and so on.
Next the customer describes their other sites, and you can begin to see the bigger picture.
This customer is using some Microsoft O365 Applications in Azure in addition to hosting some of
their own custom applications as Azure VMs as well.
The customer also has a number of SaaS applications outside of Azure too.
They have a remote branch office, hosting some local file services and a number of employees and
customers who work remotely and or access a number of services remotely
Finally, they have a secondary data center, which is used for disaster recovery of the main HQ.
You will also need to understand the data profile within each site. This will help you address sizing
and scale considerations later on. We will cover data profiling in more detail momentarily.
Next, you need to know what the protection and recovery requirements for each site are. This
includes whether a local copy is made and where any distinct copies will be sent.
In order to calculate scale, you will need to know how many server instances and or endpoint
devices will be managed. It will help aid the design process by having this number broken down by
site.
Finally it is worth understanding the network connectivity and network bandwidth available in each
location, especially if the customer is planning on moving data between sites. You can also ask for a
copy of a network topology diagram if they have one. The customer in this example is using a series
of VPNs over the Internet.
Role of Backup Systems for Business Continuity
Role of backup systems for Business Continuity

DataPath
Users
Storage
VM MediaAgent RAID
MA
DR
VM MediaAgent Commserve®
MA
Databases
Recovery
Network Points Redundancy
Clustering
Clients
Failover High Availability
Notes:
Planning for Disaster Recovery and High Availability are much broader topics than can be covered
within the scope of this course, as they will form part of an organizations overall Business Continuity plan.
However, two common questions that you might encounter are What happens if the CommServe® goes
down”? and “What happens if I lose a MediaAgent or storage target”?
Although you will be well prepared to answer these questions following the completion of this course,
you should not get too bogged down discussing every single “what-if” scenario. Instead, focus the
discussion on the SLAs required for the backup system itself, remembering that it will play a major part
of the overall business continuity plan.
If the customer desires true High Availability of the backup system to support their business continuity
plan, then they need to understand that it involves a lot more than just the redundancy of the
Commvault® server components themselves. In fact it will require redundancy across every single
hardware component in the solution. Components that are highly available typically increase the overall
cost and complexity of the solution and your end goal here is to balance these factors with the required
SLAs, while still meeting the solution objectives.
Data Profiling
Data Profiling
• Overall footprint of data in the
environment?
• Composure of data in the environment?
(File System, E-Mail, Database, Images by
%)
 Overall data – ~300TBs
• Estimates on the age characteristics of  100TBs VMWare
data in the environment?  10TBs Databases
• On- and off-site retention configuration  200TBs File Data
strategy in the environment? Dependency  Stale data can be left at 70%, arbitrary
on the application being protected?  30day local, 15day off-site

 Critical hourly RPO for databases
• Scheduling and Methodologies – Backup
 Daily incremental, weekly full
Frequency and Type? Recovery time
objectives (RTO)? Recovery point
objectives (RPO)?
Notes:
Another early area of discovery should focus on the actual data in a customer environment.
Items such as the overall footprint of data in the environment, which is also referred to as front end
data in Commvault® nomenclature, should be noted. Front-end data is equivalent to the amount of
capacity that would be consumed if a full backup were to be conducted at a point in time across a
customer’s entire environment.
Although customers may not be sure, you should also try to get a pulse on the composition of data
in an environment, as well as the age characteristics of that data. Composition of data can comprise
of a mix of various data types in an environment, including general file system data, email,
database generated data, virtualized data, and so on. Age characteristics refers to the creation
date or access time to data in an environment. Many customers have a high percentage of data
that is stale and has not been touched for years.
It is also important to understand a customer’s retention policies and the SLA’s that the
organization has established for the various data types in an environment. If an organization does
not have clear ideas surrounding retention or service level agreements around data management, it
may be due to the fact that their legacy solution treats all data as equal. The benefits of plan-based
management and its implications on SLA’s should be explained and explored.
And lastly the methodologies and scheduling of data management operations should also be
considered. For example, how often are backups performed and what type of backups are they
(full, incremental, differential, etc.…)? Will these deliver on expected RTOs (Recovery Time
Objective) or RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives)
Now let’s focus on building some basic data profiles.
Basic Environment Profile
Basic Environment Profile Licensing and Registration
Site A: Chicago
Workloads
VM VM
On-Prem Database Servers File Servers

VMware • Prod DB SQL • 15x File Servers
• 500x VMs • 25x DB Servers • 200 FETB
• 100 FETB • 10 FETB
Notes:
Profiles grow in value with the more data that you collect. In this example, we have a pretty simple
top level view, where our one location, Chicago, seemingly has a little over 300TBs (pronounced,
terabytes) of data to manage, spread out across three different data types. Our customer is
protecting 100TBs spread across 500 virtual machines, 25 SQL (pronounced, sequel) database
servers that consist of 10TBs, and 200TBs of file data This level of data capture can be useful, but
really can be used for calculating licensing for Commvault Complete Data Protection as this
provides you with the minimum in formation you would need to do so.
While this profile can be useful for that case, the more basic the data profile, the more limited the
design potential, and the more assumptions and caveats your solution architecture will contain,
generally speaking. Depending on the stage of your opportunity this may provide a perfectly
acceptable level of solution design initially, with further scope to further refine it in more detail
along the way.
Better Environment Profile
Notes:
To build on this profile though, consider asking probing questions to help flesh out an actual basic
design, like:
 How long are they looking to keep their data?
Depending on how long environments need data on hand, this can change where data is stored or
what storage to use for particular data types. In this instance for example, Chicago wants to keep their
data on hand for thirty days on site. This could lead to further questions about disaster recovery
decisions, where retaining data elsewhere, may come to light. It happens to be in this instance, our
customer has a separate site where data can be retained separately for fifteen days.
 What kind of data growth is expected?
With the amount of data growth in an environment, this can guide your design to include some storage
options that Commvault® may offer like HyperScale® or Metallic Recovery Reserve.
Answers to these questions should provide you enough to start building out a design as seen here but
shouldn’t be the only scope of your discovery.
Recovery point objectives (RPO) , recovery time objectives (RTO), and recovery level objectives (RLO)
can change the whole scope of a design or add even further depth to scope out, to name just a few
additional factors.
Server/ Application Instances
Notes:
Finally, taking solution discovery a step further involves collecting even more granular information
about the servers instances, applications, and other production workloads from each site. This
Site Discovery Checklist is just one example of how you can collect this level of information,
although you may need to create something specific for your opportunity or the customer may
provide you with their own format. Either way, this level of information would serve you well, all
the way through to a detailed low-level design document.
Click on the resources link in the top righthand corner of this window, to download a blank copy of
the site discovery checklist shown here. You can use it when conducting your own solution
discovery exercises, if you wish.
Discovery of existing CommCell Environments
Notes:
Discovery should not be limited to new customers or greenfield sites. In fact, Commvault’s range of
dashboards and metric reports can be an extremely useful way of running solution discovery on
existing CommCells. It also gives you a good reason to stay in regular contact with existing customers
and help identify potential areas of improvement in their environment. It will also help you uncover
new sales opportunities and put you in the driving seat for any potential upgrade project.
The Worldwide or CommCell® Dashboards on the Cloud Services Website, displays a preview of the
most critical information gathered from one or more CommServe servers in the customer environment.
This is a useful place to start, especially if you are new to an account, as it will help you get an idea of
what the environment looks like. For example, you can see how the current solution is performing by
looking at the environment SLA, support incidents, and health statistics. You can also get an idea of the
size of the environment by looking at the usage overview, data retention, and current capacity usage.
Let’s look at a few specific reports and how they might be useful in your discovery process.
The disk library growth report, displays information about the available space on disk libraries, including
the current status and the date when the library will be full. This is a useful metric as it will help you
identify if and when a customer will run out of disk capacity. Are they already planning an upgrade?
What capacity do they need to support their growth? Perhaps this is the opener to a conversation
about Commvault HyperScale™, or Metallic Recovery Reserve.
The health report contains information about the overall wellness of the CommCell® environment. The
health report can be useful to identify potential issues or risks in the environment and where
improvements can be made. Some specific areas to look out for are the DDB (deduplication database)
and Index health, as issues here can have a direct impact on the performance of the environment and
can often point to potential upgrades or expansion requirements.
Next, we have the license usage report, which provides information about the number and types
licenses used. Information includes the percentage of capacity consumed, types of licenses used, and
the number of users who consume licenses. This information is useful to gain an insight on the current
environment usage as well as enabling discussions about conversions or upgrades from legacy licensing
models, future planning, and uplifts.
Likewise, the peak capacity usage growth report displays information about license consumption over
time and predicts license consumption in the future. This report can help customers plan and budget
data protection costs.
Finally, the Growth and trends report includes several charts that displays information about the media
size, app size, and number of clients for entities such as CommCells, Agents, and Client Groups. This
information is useful to visualize the type and quantity of workloads there are in the environment. It
also shows areas of the CommCell® which are showing signs of reduction or growth, such as cloud
libraries for example.
Many of the reports mentioned rely on Metrics Reporting, which is included as part of Commvault®
Complete. Metrics is configured using either a Private Metrics Reporting Server or Cloud Metrics
Reporting, of which there is no cost to use Commvault’s Cloud Services Portal. Remember to consult
Commvault® documentation for more information on the various configurations and access
methodologies. We have only discussed a fraction of the total reports available in the Metrics reporting
framework but consider going through all the available reports in more detail as the more information
you have the more effective you will be. Commvault Partners should work with their local Commvault®
TAMs (technical account managers)in order to confirm the availability of customer reports.
Control and Data Planes
Control and Data Planes

INDUSTRY’S PRIMARY STORAGE WORKLOADS SECONDARY STORAGE
BROADEST On-prem Multi-cloud Hybrid-cloud SaaS Devices Database VMs Containers Multi-cloud Hybrid-cloud Metallic Recovery
WORKLOAD Reserve™
COVERAGE
• Global Data Manager • Immutable retention with full Air Gap network control
• Plans/Pools/SLA Outcomes • Comprehensive RBAC control & audit
CONTROL • Secure control, access, validation • Security Assessment governance
PLANE • Cyber Recovery Readiness • Lifecycle - deduplication, encryption, verification
• Multi-Cloud Highly available Single Pane of • Granular policy control (client-level)
Glass
Commvault HyperScale™ X Appliance Commvault Media Servers to

NAS | SAN | Object
• Immutable File System

CV Media Servers
• SE Linux Hardened
• Retention Lock
DATA PLANE AirGap
• Erasure Coded (4:2)
• 5PB+ Scalable Dedupe
+ Logical Airgap w/ Deduplication
Immutable Appliance
Tape Cloud
Any Storage Target
Notes:
When we look at the data that we are collecting here, it is all in service to design an effective Control
and Data Plane.
The control plane will comprise of actual hardware, like CommServe servers, web servers, and web
consoles, amongst others. It will also comprise of the abstracts available through the use of so said
hardware, like Command Center, plans, scheduling, and the likes. The data plane will comprise of
MediaAgents, their respective storage available to them, and proxies that will help in the movement of
data. Both planes can consist of other abstracts and technologies, but when presenting high level
solutions to your potential customers, take advantage of simplifying architecture down to these two
frameworks.
Throughout the remainder of this curriculum, we will speak further on design concepts around
individual components in each of these areas.
Wrap-up
Wrap-up
• Solution Discovery
• Discover and Collect
• Data Profiling
• Reporting
• Design Decisions
Notes:
In this module you learned about solution discovery and the importance of collecting certain key
information from your customers in order to assist you with your Commvault® proposals.
First, we talked through a typical Commvault® solution design process. We then discussed how to
establish an overview of the customers environment and perform a Data profiling exercise.
You have seen examples of Discovery and Collection techniques, to assist you with obtaining the
proper information to aid your solution design.
We also discussed discovery of CommCells for existing accounts using Dashboards and Metrics
Reporting.
Finally, All customer data is not created equal and gathering a data profile from the customer will allow
you to make appropriate design decisions.
Thank You
Copyright © 2022 Commvault | All Rights Reserved 15

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COMMVAULT PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION- INTERNAL AND PARTNER UNDER NDA USE ONLY- DO NOT DISTRIBUTE

Copyright © 2022 Commvault | All Rights Reserved

Welcome to the “Solution Discovery” module, presented by Commvault®.

Commvault Solution Design Process

Environment Overview and Data Profiling

Environment Overview and Data Profiling

• An Environment overview provides a high-

type and other criteria.

Discover and Collect

Role of Backup Systems for Business Continuity

Role of backup systems for Business Continuity

• On- and off-site retention configuration  200TBs File Data

on the application being protected?  30day local, 15day off-site

Basic Environment Profile

Basic Environment Profile Licensing and Registration

On-Prem Database Servers File Servers

Better Environment Profile

Server/ Application Instances

Discovery of existing CommCell Environments

Control and Data Planes

Control and Data Planes

Commvault HyperScale™ X Appliance Commvault Media Servers to

• Immutable File System

• Discover and Collect

Copyright © 2022 Commvault | All Rights Reserved 15

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