CommVault Creates Cross Vendor eDiscovery Access and Search with Index Engines

The evolving nature of today's corporate legal landscape is creating sets of problems that companies never envisioned when they put data protection software in place years ago. Electronic data discoveries, ad hoc searches, legal holds and establishing chains of custody are now all part of today's corporate requirements that are pushing the capabilities of their existing data protection software to the limit.

Those companies using CommVault Systems' Simpana® Software Suite are better positioned than most to address these needs. CommVault® Simpana software addresses specific needs because of inherent features like its Single Instance Store, underlying integration with the Microsoft/FAST search engine and intelligent agents that index data as it is stored. However every product has its limitations when it comes to accessing, indexing and searching backup data created by other enterprise data protection software products and CommVault's Simpana Suite is no exception.

Yet, this is the situation in which some of its customers who have recently switched from other data protection products to CommVault occasionally find themselves - up the proverbial creek without a paddle. These customers may need to access, search and index backup data created prior to when they implemented CommVault Simpana software. Finding themselves in a position where they need to adopt extreme measures to respond to legal discoveries and produce the requested data, some customers have even had to go so far as to build out an entirely new backup environment so they could first recover the data from tape to disk so the data could be searched.

It is resolving these types of costly and time-consuming episodes that makes today's announcement about the pairing between CommVault and Index Engines significant. CommVault recognizes that accessing and reading data stored by competitive data protection products is not its core competency today. However, CommVault also recognized that a growing number of its clients have a pressing need to access this largely inaccessible information and require a more cost-effective, less painful way to do so.

I spoke to Robert Brower, CommVault's Director of Professional Services, about what sorts of benefits this alliance will provide to CommVault clients. Brower explained that in the immediate short term it gives current CommVault clients the flexibility to extract data from their existing tapes without the need to rebuild entire backup environments. Using CommVault's professional services, customers can send these tapes offsite to CommVault. At CommVault's New Jersey facility, CommVault uses an Index Engines appliance to extract all or just specified backup data or objects from the tapes. Then using CommVault, they import this data and provide it back to the client so they can manage it going forward.

Longer term the ramifications are equally significant. Some users may want to extract all of the data on all of their tapes and convert it into a format that is accessible, indexed and searchable by CommVault. In these cases, users can either outsource these tapes to CommVault's professional services or they can, if they have the time and resources, buy an Index Engines appliance and perform this task themselves.

Users can also use the combination of CommVault and Index Engines products to reduce the number of tapes under management. Brower encountered one customer that had thousands of LTO-1 tapes that they wanted to index, access and search, but long term use CommVault to manage the data on higher capacity tapes. Brower says, "Together CommVault Systems and Index Engines can reduce thousands of LTO-1 tapes to hundreds of LTO-4 tapes."

Some alliances in the storage industry just make sense and this is one of them. This alliance between CommVault and Index Engines gives companies a new mechanism in which to immediately access, search and index data regardless of which data protection software they used in the past. Together CommVault and Index Engines give companies a powerful new option to solve their immediate electronic data discovery needs while providing companies a roadmap for standardizing the management of all of their backup data under CommVault's Simpana data and information management umbrella.