Blessing Hospital Finds the Magic in CommVault®'s Simpana® SIS

One of the toughest aspects of being a storage administrator is finding reliable information that one can use to make decisions about competitive storage hardware or software products, especially when it comes to making decisions about newer technologies like Single Instance Store (SIS). Even when data does become available, it is often too generic or not applicable to their situation so the individual is left in the position of either trusting the vendor's literature or doing some level of testing. In the case of Blessing Hospital's Technical Support Analyst II, Doug Barry, he opted for the latter.

Barry was recently put in the situation where he began to doubt that his data protection software was providing the level of protection that Blessing Hospital needed in order to recover its data. So before anything seriously bad happened to its data, he felt that a change in data protection software was required. However as he started to evaluate contending enterprise data protection software products, he could not ascertain which one was best suited for Blessing Hospital so he decided to bring in each of the contending products and test them.

When testing the products, he essentially put them through what he described as a drag race. Each product was loaded on the same server hardware and had to back up the same amount of data to disk. However what made Blessing Hospital's data unique is that it used a PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) system to create and manage its imaging files. The PACS system creates a large number of files that only change infrequently but need to be kept online for ready access to meet specific HIPAA regulations.

A particular vexing problem he ran across when backing up files on the PACS system is that periodically the PACS management database would touch a large number of files. Though none of the content in any of the files would change, the PACS system would in some way change permissions on the files. What he discovered in his testing is that the different backup software packages would interpret these changed file permissions differently. Some products would conclude that the files had changed and needed to be backed up again. This would dramatically increase backup times and the amount of data backed up.

What Barry specifically found noteworthy was how much the different backup software products differed in how they performed the file scan. In most cases, the larger the server, the larger the file system it had; the larger the file system, the longer it took to scan. In this aspect, the CommVault® Simpana® software suite distanced itself from the competitors in his environment. "The scan up front is where the magic is," says Barry.

Barry came to understand that CommVault's Simpana software is so effective in scanning files during backups because of how its intelligent agents interact with CommVault's underlying Single Instance Store (SIS) database. Its intelligent agents don't just look at a file's permissions but at the file's make-up. As the agent scans the file, if it determines the file permissions have changed but the file has not, CommVault knows it does not need to backup the file again. This, says Barry, resulted in backup times that were about half of what he achieved using Symanctec's Backup Exec.

Barry said the choice eventually came down to EMC Networker and the CommVault Simpana Suite. Even though he considers Blessing Hospital an EMC shop and has a lot of respect for EMC, he chose CommVault. Since his implementation of CommVault software, he finds that he has reduced the total amount of storage he stores on the back-end as well as the time it takes to do backups.

Equally important is what Barry said as I was finishing up my call with him. While single instance stores and reduced backup times are great, data restoration is where the rubber meets the road. In this respect, he has seen restore times decrease from an hour to 15 - 20 minutes.

Barry's methodical approach to selecting the appropriate data protection product for Blessing Hospital deserves some accolades and not only because he choose the CommVault Simpana software. No matter how much is written about a product or how many case studies one reads, one never really knows for sure (even the vendor) until you put the product through the paces in your environment. As Barry found out, SIS was a feature that he may never have thought to look for in the literature or ask of the vendor, but through testing it ended up being the feature that separated the CommVault Simpana software from the pack.