Backup infrastructure stories often center on a ransomware attack. This one centers on something more common: a contract running out.
A hospital network in New York was using an off-site, immutable copy of its Commvault backups for disaster recovery — a sound architecture. But the vendor providing that storage as a service had become a problem. Costs were rising. The vendor's own tools and terms limited how the hospital could access its data.
Their agreement with the vendor was ending, and the hospital needed a proven, compliant replacement that would work with its existing Commvault setup without a migration project, and it needed one fast. Patient data and compliance requirements don't pause for a vendor transition.
Why Speed Mattered
A typical backup-target evaluation at this scale takes months: security review, compliance sign-off, a migration plan, a cutover window, a rollback plan. A hospital IT team with an expiring contract doesn't have months to work with.
The Solution
The hospital replaced its backup target with Azure Native Qumulo (ANQ), a Commvault-validated S3 backup target. ANQ is a fully managed file and object storage service that runs in Azure and serves the Amazon S3 API natively, so Commvault can write to it the same way it writes to any other S3-compatible cloud storage target — no gateway, no translation layer in between. That's what made this a configuration change instead of a migration: Commvault already speaks S3, so switching targets meant creating a bucket and access keys on ANQ and pointing Commvault's existing cloud storage library at the new endpoint.
Qumulo configured a compliant, object-locked immutable backup target on ANQ in under an hour. Commvault kept running the same backup jobs it always had; only the storage target underneath changed. No new backup software to qualify, no new agents to deploy on hospital systems, no new workflow for the operations team to learn.
Within that hour, the target was receiving backups. Patient data was protected, SLAs were met, and compliance requirements remained satisfied throughout the transition on the contract's timeline, not a typical infrastructure project's timeline.
Durable AND Fast
A fast cutover only matters if the result holds up afterward. Two things made this solution durable as well as quick.
First, the speed didn't come at the cost of immutability. ANQ enforces S3 Object Lock in Compliance mode — the stronger of the two S3 lock modes. No user or privileged account, including an administrator, can shorten a retention period or delete a locked object before it expires. That's the same level of protection a longer, more elaborate migration would have delivered, without requiring one.
Second, the cost is predictable after go-live. A backup target isn't just written to once — it gets read back during verification jobs, DR drills, audits, and restores for as long as the retention policy runs. Each of those reads is a transaction against the backend object store, and transaction volume is what tends to make a backup bill grow after signing, not the storage rate itself. ANQ includes NeuralCache, a caching layer that serves frequently-accessed data from local NVMe storage instead of routing each read operation to the backend as a billed request. That keeps the cost of verifying and testing backups from climbing the way it can with a typical managed-cloud target.
Not an Isolated Case
This situation isn't unique to one hospital. Organizations typically find out a managed backup arrangement has become rigid only when they need it to change — a contract renewal, a cost review, an audit that needs data the vendor makes hard to reach. The default assumption is that fixing this requires a migration. It usually doesn't. Since Commvault already writes to S3 targets; changing providers simply means changing the S3 target it points to; in this case, ANQ.
Qumulo has been a validated Commvault S3 target for years and protects Commvault backups at multi-petabyte scale across enterprise, education, and healthcare environments, including organizations that have made this same switch.
The Takeaway
Ransomware is the risk most often discussed for backup infrastructure, and it's a real one. A more common failure mode gets less attention: a vendor arrangement that works fine until it needs to change, and can't. If your backup target's contract is up for renewal, it's worth asking more than just "is it immutable": how long would it take to deploy a replacement, and what would it cost to keep verifying that it works? ANQ not only offers scalable, immutable object storage services at a predictable cost, but it can be deployed and used within minutes directly from the Azure Marketplace.
Talk to your Qumulo account team about what an Azure Native Qumulo backup target could look like for your Commvault environment. Meanwhile, download our new solution brief here.