Commvault, Oracle Extend Partnership to Develop Metallic DMaaS on OCI

Commvault and Oracle have extended their partnership to develop Commvault’s Metallic SaaS-based data protection offering for Oracle Cloud. The new Metallic Data Management as a Service (DMaaS) on Oracle Cloud, released Wednesday, is a managed backup and recovery service.

Metallic DMaaS is available immediately in all 38 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) regions throughout the world, initially supporting IaaS workloads. Specifically, Commvault’s Metallic offering provides backup and recovery of Oracle workloads by writing to OCI Storage. It protects OCI virtual machines, Oracle databases, the Kubernetes-based Oracle Container Engine and Oracle Linux instances.

While Oracle has a marginal share of the public cloud infrastructure market, the company earlier this month reported improved growth. Oracle’s total cloud revenue during its most recent quarter increased 22% year-over-year. Meanwhile, IaaS revenues grew 39% for the quarter, compared to the same period last year.

Potential Customer Base

Commvault claims that more than 100,000 customers running Linux-based Oracle workloads on traditional Commvault platforms are looking to migrate to OCI. For its part, Oracle reports 400,000 customers planning to move to OCI need a data protection offering. Metallic DMaaS is currently the only SaaS-based data protection offering for OCI, according to Oracle SVP of alliances David Hicks.

Oracle’s David Hicks

“This is an exclusive for us; it’s the only partner that we have for this,” Hicks told Channel Futures. “There are very few options out there, I think, that probably offer the robustness of what Metallic could give to our customers. There’s the IaaS layer of our autonomous Exadata cloud service and things that we’re doing in our interconnect with Microsoft Azure, and our dedicated regions that provide cloud setups for businesses or for governments. The road map and what they’ve got to offer fits well into our long-term strategy.”

Manoj Nair, general manager of Commvault’s Metallic organization, emphasized the Metallic Recovery Reserve storage service provides protection from ransomware attacks.

Commvault’s Manoj Nair

“Metallic Recovery Reserve, which we formerly called Metallic Cloud Storage Service, gives customers an air-gapped copy of their data in the cloud,” Nair said. “And we’re introducing Metallic Recovery Reserve on OCI. That didn’t exist, but now any Metallic customer on OCI can have an air-gapped copy of their data in OCI cloud.”

Available to Commvault and Oracle Partners

Commvault, which is pushing to expand Metallic’s reach via MSPs, is poised to gain ground via Oracle’s partner ecosystem. The new offering is available via the Oracle Partner Network, including the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, as well as though Commvault partners. Oracle’s Hicks said many partners have requested a viable data protection offering for OCI.

“I spent time with a group of our managed service providers that are very critical to bringing Oracle and non-Oracle workloads to OCI,” Hicks said. “An easy example would be our thousands of existing business suite PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers, who are increasingly running those on OCI via such a partner. Those partners all need this as part of that backup and recovery strategy as they surround these applications in the cloud, with much more of a cloud-native approach.”

Oracle has created positioning guides and reference materials for its partners, so they can attach the Metallic offering, Hicks said.

“We’re very excited to go forward and promote this very heavily amongst our channel. And I think they’re going to be very interested in what we’re bringing out.”