Does a Paradigm Shift in Information Management Loom?; Interview with CommVault's Simon Taylor

There is a growing perception among those who are intimately involved with information management that the discipline of information management is changing. The fact that it is changing comes as no surprise to anyone as everyone knows that a change has to occur. The question is, "Is this just an evolutionary change or is a paradigm shift in information management about to occur?"

Whether companies realize it or not, they are making decisions about how their companies' information will be managed and accessed short and long term every day. Whether it is through the selection of backup appliance that does deduplication; backup software that controls what data is backed up and when; or archiving software that controls how long data is kept and who has the rights to access it; these are all examples of day-to-day decisions that impact the larger corporate picture of how easy, or difficult, it is for companies to manage and access their information enterprise wide.

CommVault Systems in particular has some very definite opinions that pressure is building for a transformation in how corporate information is accessed and managed. I recently spoke with Simon Taylor, CommVault Systems' Senior Director of Information Access and Management, about this topic in terms of how CommVault is meeting corporate information access and management needs now and how he sees this changing in the future.

In this role, Taylor manages a team that has members in Australia, EMEA and the US. The purpose of this group is to architect the CommVault® Simpana® software suite so it can continue to adapt to growing corporate data stores and control access to the information once it is put into its data store.

Jerome: Simon, you are responsible for managing a product that sounds very familiar to Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) that has fallen out of favor in the last few years. Can you elaborate?

Simon: ILM is a phrase that got overused in the US but it is still a phrase that describes a problem that companies are trying to address. In the US, CommVault still talks about it though we just use a different metaphor to describe it. In Europe and the Middle East, ILM is still very much alive as it does not carry the same negative connotation that it does here in the US. In these regions of the world, CommVault is still actively engaged in conversations around ILM.

Jerome: Archiving is a major component of ILM and I noticed that CommVault has a number of products specifically designed for Archiving including File & NAS, Exchange, SharePoint, Lotus Domino and CAS. Why these particular products and are you seeing any demand for archiving in any other space?

Simon: Archiving as a market is changing all of the time though at CommVault we feel we have done a good job in remaining current on these topics. In the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant, CommVault moved further to the up and right than any other archiving vendor which CommVault believes reflects the good breadth of Simpana's capability.

In terms of the products CommVault offers, email is still important but CommVault is encountering more opportunities in the areas of file and SharePoint archiving. In many cases, these opportunities are arising because of the cohesion CommVault has with Microsoft. An example of the strength of that relationship with Microsoft is found in how CommVault can recover just individual files in SharePoint as opposed to first needing to recover the entire database to access and recover a single file.

That relationship was only heightened by Microsoft's recent acquisition of FAST Index and Search. FAST is the search engine that CommVault uses to search all the archive and backup data it manages. This is created at the same time data is single instanced at the object (file, document & attachment) level through its Single Instance Store (SIS). Simpana creates a content index across over 400 different files so it does not matter what you are searching for, FAST can find it, including across 77 different languages.

Jerome: Notably absent from this list of archive products are any products that perform database archiving. Can you explain where CommVault is on support for database archiving?

Simon: The jury is still out on the best way to do database archiving. Whenever you move data out of a database, you have to preserve all of the links and the meta model. This becomes very difficult to do once the data is outside of the main database. Since data can be added, deleted and changed, links can become broken or impossible to rebuild in the future to reflect these changes. Today CommVault does not have a specific solution for database archiving. Instead CommVault chooses to partner with niche vendors in this area, and at the same time constantly evaluates the best and most seamless methods of archiving data stored in a database as the requirement for it evolves. For now, often the best way is to create a smaller database.

In part 3 in this 3-part interview series, Simon discusses emerging challenges with Information Access and how evolving laws in the US and internationally are presenting new challenges as to how archived data is managed, searched and retained.