For InfoReliance's John Chirhart, CommVault is about Quality of Life

There are many reasons why a company or individual may switch from one backup software product to another. Sometimes there is a need for the backup software to integrate with specific applications like Microsoft Exchange or Oracle. Sometimes it is because their environment has outgrown their backup software and they need a more robust backup software package. And then sometimes it is a combination of all of these factors such that switching to new backup software not only improves the success of the backups, it improves the individual's quality of life.

Such was the case for John Chirhart. Prior to becoming a consultant with InfoReliance, an IT firm that contracts for federal agencies, Chirhart was a system administrator at one of the federal agencies that now does business with InfoReliance. In that capacity during the late 1990's/early 2000's, Chirhart served as an ARCserve administrator in a Novell environment but "fell in love" with Microsoft Active Directory (AD) since he found it so much easier to manage than Novell Directory Services (NDS).

Chirhart's problem was that at that time there was no such thing as easy way to backup Microsoft AD with ARCserve. Compounding his problem, he also had a SAN in place which ARCserve did not backup well either. This put Chirhart in a predicament. He was already stressed because every time he was called upon to recover a file from tape, he had no confidence that he could actually recover the file. So even though he knew it was the backup software that was the problem, he also knew that in managements' eyes it would always be his fault if he could not recover the data.

This put Chirhart on the prowl for new backup software. After calling around to some of his IT buddies, one recommended CommVault. Now this was in the early 2000's before anyone really knew much about CommVault but his friend said that it worked and Chirhart was low on options so he agreed to test it. However he made one stipulation before agreeing to proceed with CommVault - "I need to see it working before I buy it."

In retrospect, this was probably a bigger demand that even Chirhart realized. Since he worked in the federal government, it initially required him to jump through a number of hoops to even bring CommVault in-house. To the best of Chirhart's knowledge, it possibly was one of the first demos and implementations of CommVault in a classified agency within the federal government. Complicating the matter, CommVault had recently finished a code re-write at about the same time that Microsoft was putting the finishing touches on AD. So he was one of the first customers to put CommVault's software through the paces in a production environment with Microsoft AD.

Chirhart's disaster recovery (DR) requirements exceeded that of what most other CommVault users at that time demanded. Since he was already using Microsoft AD, he needed CommVault to restore AD objects to a granular level. However his agency's DR needs went well beyond recovering from floods, power outages or system outages caused by human error. His DR plan also called for him to account for how his agency would recover from artillery strikes.

To make a long story short, after 2 - 3 weeks of testing Chirhart found that CommVault passed all of his internal tests while providing him with a sense of assurance that he could both successfully backup and recover his data using CommVault. He then went on to implement CommVault at that agency and manage it for a number of years before moving on to work at InfoReliance.

Chirhart no longer works directly for that federal agency but remains a strong advocate of CommVault to this day. Why he feels that way was exemplified by a comment he made towards the end of our conversation which I remember it because it is rare that I hear statements like this from current or former backup administrators. Chirhart says, "The more CommVault® CommCells® I see, the easier my job becomes because it means I have the tools to do my job." Exactly what tools CommVault provides for Chirhart to do his job as federal government contractor I will cover in more detail in a forthcoming blog entry.