Hi!

Commvault V11 SP18.24.    Our entire CommCell infrastructure is on-prem (no Media Agents/Storage in the Cloud).     We are testing backups of Sharepoint Online to Commvault.   We already perform Exchange backups for a 125TiB mailbox environment, with 'good 'nuff' speeds of ~60GB/hour.

Sharepoint, however, seems to be a slightly different animal.   

We have a mere 15GiB (yes, gigabytes) of data on our Sharepoint sites.  Maybe 5,000 objects.  I learned from my Exchange Online experience that more O365 service accounts = less throttling/better performance, but I figured for an  initial 15GiB of data, a single account would do the job.   We only eke out ~1GB/hour (for both full and incremental backups).    So a full backup of the 15GiB can take over 12 hours!   Incremental runs have processed in as little as 20 minutes, and as long as 4 hours.  

Based on an engagement with Commvault Support, and reference to the Commvault FAQ for Sharepoint Online:

1.) We added four more O365 service accounts to the config

2.) Explicitly enabled Azure API call decoration (which is supposedly set by default, but WTH!)

3.) Specified 'Backup latest version only' when initiating a backup

After these changes, the next Full backup realized ~1.4GB/hour.    So a marked improvement (but, regrettably, no where near fast enough to be practical).

I have a ticket open with Commvault Support, and I'm waiting on a response on this next question:

What is considered to be a reasonable thoughput rate for backups from Sharepoint Online to an On-Prem Commvault Commcell?    Has anyone managed to hit 60 or 120GB/hour?  Microsoft throttling is a real thing, but has Commvault managed to effectively work-around this for Sharepoint Online?

For people with Media Agents and storage in the Cloud, what are your experiences with protecting Sharepoint Online with Commvault?  

Is Commvault worth it for the Sharepoint Online use case, or is Microsoft's built-in data protection and backup sufficient for most customers?  

Thank you for your time!

mikeymac

Were you able to find out more from Support? Or did you still need more information?

I had a meeting with our account team and one of the Commvault Sharepoint Online developers this morning.   Apparently, they're re-writing the Sharepoint Online agent with many optimization features.   They want me to run some backups again and re-capture logs, and send them along to them for review.  

This may be a case where it may not be ready for prime-time in its current incarnation, but maybe the next version can do the job.  It's possible that these guys (who are actual Sharepoint Online agent experts) will spot a misconfiguration of some kind.  

Thanks for your reply!