# Commvault Flex Open Capacity Planning Guidelines

## 1. Size Nodes Based on BET

Commvault Flex Open supports 1 TB to 500 TB BET per node and is available in four sizing tiers.

T-Shirt Size | Capacity (BET) | Typical Use Case
--- | --- | ---
Small | Up to 50 TB | Small businesses, branch offices
Medium | Up to 150 TB | Mid-sized environments
Large | Up to 300 TB | Enterprise workloads
Extra Large | Up to 500 TB | Large enterprise and high-performance environments

As protected capacity grows, you can add additional Commvault Flex Open nodes to distribute workloads.

## 2. Size for Performance as Well as Capacity

Capacity is only one part of the sizing exercise. Also consider the following factors:

- Daily backup ingest (TB/day)
- Number of concurrent backup jobs
- Recovery time objectives (RTOs)
- Number of simultaneous restores
- Workload mix (VMs, databases, NAS, cloud applications)
- Threat Analysis processing requirements

For environments with high backup throughput or demanding recovery SLAs, multiple nodes may be preferable even if a single node has sufficient capacity.

## 3. Scale Out as Requirements Grow

Commvault Flex Open follows a familiar Commvault MediaAgent architecture and can be expanded by adding nodes.

Typical growth triggers include:

- Increasing protected capacity
- Higher daily change rates
- More concurrent backup streams
- Faster recovery requirements
- Additional geographic locations or business units

Adding nodes distributes backup processing and improves aggregate throughput while maintaining operational simplicity.

## 4. Size Storage Independently

Commvault Flex Open supports both internal and external storage, allowing storage to be selected based on business requirements rather than appliance constraints.

Supported storage options include:

- Direct-attached storage (DAS)
- NAS
- Fibre Channel / iSCSI block storage
- S3 object storage
- Tape
- Dell Data Domain
- HPE StoreOnce

Storage should be sized for:

- Required retention
- Expected data growth
- Immutability (if applicable)
- Backup and restore performance

## 5. Plan for Growth

When sizing a new deployment, include future growth rather than sizing only for today's requirements.

Planning Horizon | Recommended Capacity Headroom
--- | ---
12 months | ~25%
24 months | ~50%
Rapid growth / AI workloads | 75–100%

This approach minimizes future hardware refreshes and allows additional Commvault Flex Open nodes to be introduced as performance and capacity demands increase.

## 6. Match Hardware to the Selected T-Shirt Size

The Commvault Flex Open sizing guide defines the minimum hardware requirements for each node size, including:

- CPU cores
- Memory
- Boot SSD
- NVMe cache
- Network bandwidth
- Parallel stream capability

As node size increases, CPU, memory, cache, and networking scale accordingly to support higher backup throughput and larger datasets.

### Example Sizing

Protected Capacity (BET) | Example Deployment
--- | ---
40 TB | 1 Small node
120 TB | 1 Medium node
250 TB | 1 Large node
450 TB | 1 Extra Large node
800 TB | 2 Extra Large nodes
1.5 PB | 3 Extra Large nodes

Actual node sizing should also account for backup throughput and recovery objectives, not just total capacity.

Commvault Flex Open is sized using a T-shirt model, with each node supporting between 1 TB and 500 TB BET. Customers can start with a single node and scale out by adding additional nodes as capacity, performance, or recovery requirements grow. Storage is sized independently and can be internal or external, providing maximum deployment flexibility.

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