Partner POV | Transforming Recovery Operations: Pure Storage and Commvault's Partnership in Cyber Resilience
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This article was written by Brian Ferrar, Brian Ferrar marketing manager for FlashStack and FlashStack as-a-Service at Pure Storage.
When disruption strikes, businesses need to recover fast. Whether it's a ransomware attack, natural disaster, or user error, the ability to bounce back quickly can be the difference between a minor hiccup and a major crisis.
That's why Commvault, a global leader in cyber resilience, chose Pure Storage as its trusted partner.
"Our job is to help customers recover confidently and quickly," says Rajiv Kottomtharayil, Chief Product Officer at Commvault. "Pure Storage gives us the speed and reliability we need to do the same for ourselves."
Faster Recovery Means Minimal Business Disruption
Commvault's commitment to protecting its customers starts with protecting its own business. Internally, performance and recovery speed are top priorities. The company safeguards critical applications like SQL Server, Active Directory, and Azure Stack HCI environments. In the past, restoring a single 11TB database could take up to 12 hours. With Pure Storage® FlashBlade//S™, those same recoveries now happen in just over an hour.
"We wanted throughput that could match the urgency of our most critical systems," says Kottomtharayil. "Other solutions peaked at around two terabytes per hour. Pure Storage FlashBlade//S easily surpassed that."
This performance is vital for business functions that rely on always-on access to data.
Designed for Mission-critical Workloads
Commvault has clearly defined tiers of data as part of its own strategy for minimum viability following unplanned disruptions or cyberattacks. The most critical workloads are protected with FlashBlade//S using a native S3 interface. This setup allows data to be written directly from the protected source, bypassing intermediate servers and increasing efficiency.
"The ability to write directly to the S3 target on the Pure Storage system from the application source is a huge advantage," said Kottomtharayil. "It improves both backup and recovery times, which is essential for systems that can't afford to be offline."
The team also relies on live recovery features, mounting backup data instantly so users can continue working while full restorations are completed in the background.
"With Pure Storage solutions, we can immediately mount a VM or database and present it to applications like Hyper-V or VMware," Kottomtharayil adds. "It helps us get users back to work right away."
Preparing for Cyber Events
Beyond day-to-day operations, Commvault uses an isolated recovery environment to simulate cyberattacks and validate its disaster recovery plans. This involves spinning up entire systems in an isolated environment to test runbooks, incident response plans, and technical workflows. The ability of the Commvault Cloud platform to identify threats and orchestrate recovery, combined with the performance and immutability of Pure Storage, helps teams perform full recovery scenarios within realistic timeframes and identify gaps before they become problems.
"We use this isolated recovery environment like a war game exercise," says Kyle Allocca, Senior Systems Engineer at Commvault. "We simulate everything from full data center outages to ransomware events and ensure we can recover the critical systems quickly."
Pure Storage and Commvault have since designed a modular solution for customers based on this best practice approach that can support customers at varying stages of maturity in their operational resilience processes. The modular design allows organizations to add and scale components independently as their resilience and compliance requirements change. An example of this design can be seen in the DORA compliance solution.
Operational Simplicity That Frees Up Time
One of the biggest benefits of Pure Storage has been its ease of use. Both Kottomtharayil and Allocca described the system as "set it and forget it." Unlike other solutions that require frequent manual intervention and hours of weekly management, Pure Storage operates quietly in the background.
"I honestly forget that the system is even there," says Kottomtharayil. "That's how low maintenance it is."
Allocca agrees. "We spent so much time managing our previous storage platform. With Pure Storage, we get anomaly detection and proactive notifications through the Pure1 interface, and everything just works. It gives us peace of mind and time back to focus on other priorities."
That simplicity extended to hardware upgrades as well. Through the Pure Storage Evergreen architecture, Commvault was able to complete a FlashBlade® upgrade without downtime or disruption.
"The upgrade process was seamless," said Allocca. "No lengthy migration process, no weekend work. We cut over and kept moving."
Tangible Results and Business Value
Since investing in Pure Storage, Commvault has significantly reduced recovery times, lowered the burden on IT staff, and improved service delivery across the business. The shift saves the Commvault team hundreds of hours annually. It also allowed them to reallocate their efforts to higher-value initiatives.
"I'm able to focus on building Commvault products instead of managing backup infrastructure," said Kottomtharayil. "That's a win for us and a win for our customers."
Many of the same technologies Commvault uses internally are part of the solutions it recommends to customers around the world for hardened, secure infrastructure and high performance and near-instant restoration speeds for business-critical applications.
A Strategic Partnership with a Shared Cyber Resilience Vision
Commvault is more than a customer. It's a strategic partner to Pure Storage, working together to build tighter integrations and enhance cyber resilience for our joint customers.
The integration of the Commvault Cloud platform enhances data security, providing a flexible architecture for data management and any-to-any portability that smoothly integrates with Pure Storage as part of a NIST-based multi-layered cyber resilience architecture. The architecture includes storage-native cyber resilience capabilities such as AI-based anomaly detection, indelible SafeMode™ Snapshots, and Evergreen//One™ for immediate provisioning of secure, clean storage for recovery and forensics. The architecture protects customers with SIEM/SOAR/XDR integrations for a better cybersecurity foundation. And of course, Pure Storage and Commvault work together to ensure customers' critical data can be recovered quickly and efficiently using the Commvault Cloud platform.
"Commvault and Pure Storage are collaborating on solutions that help customers respond to cyber threats faster and recover more reliably," says Ajay Singh, Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. "Together, we provide a fast, resilient, and secure cyber resilience strategy that supports modern business needs."
"Commvault and Pure Storage are coming together to solve real customer challenges," says Kottomtharayil. "By aligning our technologies and recovery use cases, we're enabling businesses to bounce back faster, smarter, and more cost-effectively—often saving them millions in the process."