Cyber resiliency "screams services": Commvault talks up Cleanroom

Commvault has talked up the opportunity for partners to deliver data recovery plan testing for customers of its Cleanroom Recovery solution.

The vendor launched Cleanroom Recovery at its Shift conference in November 2023, touting it as a service to recover a clean room in the cloud and ensure reliable recoveries.

Commvault’s chief partner officer Alan Atkinson told CRN Australia recently “the whole point of Cleanroom is the ability to test your recovery plan.”

“With the functionality that we've got with Cleanroom, we can literally take any application regardless of where it lives…and we can recover it,” he said.

Cleanroom enables users to convert hypervisor formats into a single image and run tests “with all the dependencies of hardware and all the rest of it and generate a resiliency report that says ‘this is kind of what you've missed.’”  

The solution “screams channel, because if you don't have the services to set up those test plans, and then to do the remediation…that screams services.”

“…when you're trying to build a cyber resiliency strategy, there's an understanding that goes around of; what do your apps look like? What's your recovery plan? What's the infrastructure required for that?”

“If those apps are hybrid or cloud native…what are the interdependencies and how do I recover those? That just screams services.”

Opening the AI "Pandora's box"

In March 2024, Veeam inked a five-year partnership with Microsoft that will see the backup vendor integrate Microsoft Copilot into its portfolio.

Veeam’s CEO Anand Eswaran told CRN Australia Copilot for Veeam will launch by the US end of summer 2024.

“Think about the power of taking a backup repository that is just sitting there historically, ready for an event, a disaster; but let's put some AI over top of it, let's put Copilot over top of it and let's get some meaningful information from that data," Veeam’s ANZ regional CTO Anthony Spiteri told partners in Sydney in April. 

“What generative AI enables us to do is to take that data and unlock it. He positioned Veeam, as “custodians of that data”, as being in a “great position” to use technologies like Copilot to do more with that data.

Asked if Commvault saw a similar opportunity, Atkinson said that integrating AI into backup and recovery solutions and training LLMs with backup data “opens a bit of a Pandora's box.”

“The problem with these LLMs is [they’re] firstly impossible to understand just because of the way they work, to understand how they made the decision,” he said.

“All you've got is to go back and look at how they were trained, and figuring out how they were trained among the massive amounts of data is something that I think we’ll leave to others.”

“Because typically massive amounts of data gets fed into these things, and I've heard speculation among some of ‘I don't need that much storage, I don't need to worry about it, I'm just going to pump the data through, I don't need the data anymore, it goes away, it’s metadata.’ I don't think that's going to fly.”

“We don't want to ever unencrypt [data] in our space and get into it. We want you to be able to trust us with your data.”