Accessing and then archiving data from production application data stores is easier said than done. Of the aforementioned application servers (file servers, Exchange and SharePoint), they each require different techniques to archive data found in their respective data stores. For instance, file servers offer features and functionality that vary according to their underlying file systems and it is not unusual for companies to use file servers from different vendors. Since file systems on the file servers differ according to vendor (Linux, Windows, or UNIX) the archiving software must take each file systems' specific features into account when archiving data from these systems.
Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint present a different set of problems. When archiving data from Exchange, the archiving software often needs to make a copy of the message or file as soon as it enters Exchange to satisfy corporate compliance requirements. Later, after a specified period of time has passed, the archiving software then needs to clean up the application production data store and move aging data (30 - 90 days or older) to the appropriate media that satisfies corporate cost and compliance concerns. In the case of SharePoint, there is no effective way to journal the messages as they enter SharePoint so the archiving software must regularly run incremental jobs throughout the day.
So what's the point of this blog entry (other than to show archiving data is not trivial)? Primarily it is to point out that even though both compliance and cost concerns are motivating companies to archive the data found in their rapidly growing file server, Exchange and SharePoint data stores, the complexities associated with managing the archives from any one of these data stores are significant.
But the new reality that more enterprise companies are coming to see is that they need to archive data for not just one of these application types but all three. If companies find themselves in this situation, they should also recognize that they need to identify and select archiving software that supports each of these application types without making the management of the archived data stores untenable. Using different archiving software products can, and likely will, result in disparate management interfaces, archiving policies and data stores. These then create their own levels of complexity both in terms of managing data archives on a day-to-day basis as well as later on when it comes time to search and retrieve the archived data or restrict and/or preserve the data as part of an eDiscovery or legal hold.
In this respect, the CommVault® Simpana® software suite has set itself apart from competitors. Not only can companies archive data residing on corporate file servers or in Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint data stores using the different options available within its Simpana software, it can store and manage data from all of these various sources in one location. The benefits that companies derive from using CommVault to archive all of this data include:
Every enterprise company is coming face-to-face with the need to archive their data in their fast growing data stores: file servers, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint. But as they do so, they are also beginning to encounter not only the complexities associated with archiving data for each of these data stores but the longer term challenges associated with managing the archives after they are created. In this respect, CommVault Simpana is unique in that companies can use it to access and archive data from any of these aforementioned application data stores, store the data in one repository and then manage and search these archived stores through one common interface.
]]>Savvy technology managers of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) understand three things about the rapidly changing nature of technologies in today's world:
Yet a critical element missing in this three-step process is how to establish if the reseller or VAR that they rely upon is keeping pace with their company's needs and providing them with the appropriate level of guidance in accordance with the size of their business? Even assuming they are comfortable that their current reseller is meeting their needs, what criteria can they use to establish the credibility of their reseller so they can achieve a greater sense of assurance that they are using the right one for their business?
Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to these questions since programs vary according to the vendors which the resellers represent. However, changes announced today in CommVault's channel program provide greater insight into what technology managers at least should expect from current CommVault resellers and go a long way towards demonstrating how prepared these resellers are to support their business.
Under CommVault's enhanced reseller program, CommVault resellers will now fall into one of three tiers which are laid out as follows (from lowest to highest), each with specific reseller requirements:
What these revised programs for CommVault's resellers mean to technology managers that engage with them is that they can now more clearly understand at a high level exactly what the value-add of CommVault resellers are at each tier. Further, it can help both the technology manager and the reseller establish appropriate expectations going forward. For instance, it is only logical to expect that as a company grows the complexity and demands of its IT infrastructure will change. These tiers enable technology managers to quickly establish if the reseller is technically savvy enough to support his growing business and use these credentials to justify internally why the company should use this preferred partner.
Technology managers in most SMBs often rely upon their resellers as sources for advice as to how to best move their company forward technologically. But technology managers also sometimes need assurances that their resellers have the needed technical background and qualifications to do this and a means to objectively measure that. CommVault's three new certification tiers helps to more clearly establish how its partner programs work, and provide technology managers deeper insight into what they should realistically expect to obtain from the reseller delivering CommVault solutions with which they are engaged.
]]>If companies thought that times were tough over the last few years, 2009 is shaping up to be a doozy. Corporate layoffs, cutbacks in spending and decreased revenue coupled with the looming threat of more government regulation and oversight will make the last few years seem like a cake walk compared to what is to come. But as companies prepare to make even more cutbacks in IT staff and budgets, the "Do more with less" mandate that seems to accompany every round of corporate cutbacks remains. This directive leaves IT survivors needing to identify technology providers that can help them better manage their company's data, recover their enterprise applications more quickly and perform these tasks with minimal training, time and effort.
Just a month ago in October 2008, Gartner cut its 2009 forecast for IT spending from 5.8 to 2.3 percent and warns that it will cut its forecast even further if the economy continues to weaken. In the month since Gartner issued that forecast, a lot has occurred in the global economy and it does not take a genius to figure out that further cuts in its IT spending forecast are all but a foregone conclusion. One only needs to look at the increase in October's unemployment figures and the headlines about more companies hoping that the government bails them out for this to become self-evident. Further, since IT is the number two expense in most organizations right behind human resources, expect IT budgets to show up next on the chopping block. But as enterprise companies start to look at their 2009 IT budget, where do they begin to cut?
In many companies, their IT infrastructure is not a pretty picture. On one front, they see incessant and unending data growth regardless of what occurs in the economy or how many people they lay off. So they cannot automatically cut the amount of storage they are purchasing. Rather they need to examine what tiers of storage they are placing their data on and then ensure that data is ending up on the right storage tiers. But that's time-consuming as placing the data on the right tier of storage at the right time so it meets internal and external requirements is no trivial task. To do this, companies need to look to streamline and automate the placement, movement and retention of data which requires that companies understand their data in the first place and then use that information to place and move it between storage tiers.
Even assuming enterprises deliver on these initial data management and storage optimization objectives, companies still need to protect the data, recover it and then access and search it to meet forthcoming litigation concerns. It is no secret that there is a new President in the White House and part of his mandate (implied or otherwise) is to introduce more accountability into the business and financial world. The logical outcome of this is to expect even more legislation with new regulations and compliance requirements. This translates into companies needing to access and search their data repositories faster with less people than before.
So as companies look at what to keep and cut in their IT budgets, the decision should be based on more than the cost of the technology alone. Rather, companies need to focus on how well their current or proposed technology providers will deliver on these new demands that 2009 will impose upon them to automate and simplify their IT environment. Equally important, companies need to ascertain that vendors are doing everything in their power to work together and deliver on these new objectives.
For instance, the CommVault® Simpana® software suite has long automated many of these aforementioned data management tasks but that does not mean it is standing still. Just today CommVault announced that it is enhancing its strategic relationship with NetApp to better address these emerging corporate archiving, storage optimization and eDiscovery concerns. NetApp reciprocated by also recognizing CommVault as a strategic partner so companies can better use the CommVault Simpana software suite in conjunction with its FAS storage systems to increase storage efficiencies and drive down storage costs.
Though a relationship between CommVault and NetApp has existed for some time (nearly 10 years) and they have provided integration across their respective product lines in archive, backup, replication and eDiscovery during that time, this latest announcement illustrates new synergies that companies can achieve using these products. Since NetApp provides a common platform across all of its storage systems and CommVault delivers an integrated data management platform, companies can realize the benefits that both of these two vendors' products deliver by created a unified infrastructure from the software down to the underlying storage systems. In so doing, the sum of the benefits of using these two platforms in conjunction with one another becomes greater than using them individually.
Most companies see a rough ride ahead in 2009 and for many companies that ride has already begun. Companies are already cutting back on both their IT staff and budgets but are also realizing that they cannot also lower expectations and deliverables because today's world does not permit it. This realization should force companies to change both how they procure technology and what factors influence their buying decisions. This morning's announcement concerning the enhanced strategic relationship between CommVault and NetApp so companies can better automate the management of their IT infrastructure is just one example of the new forces that are at work and for which companies must now account for and take advantage of as they plan for 2009 and make their 2009 technology buying decisions.
]]>A specific problem that companies need to keep in mind is how do they recover data after it is no longer kept only on the disk subsystem on which it was initially stored? Backup data can be moved from disk to tape or other disk systems by a variety of methods. The backup software may copy the backup data from disk to tape. The disk subsystem may replicate the backup job to another disk subsystem at another site. There are even some disk subsystems that can copy backup data to disk or tape. This all means that there are a lot of ways for backup data to get lost or misplaced after the backup to disk is complete.
Probably the best way currently for companies to avoid this scenario is to use the backup software to manage the placement and movement of all of the data short and long term to facilitate recoveries. Yet even in this situation, there is no guarantee that companies can recover data as rapidly as they might expect. The issue that companies run into is that as their production data stores grow, so do their backup data stores. As that occurs, the index or catalog that is needed to track how much backup data companies have and where it is at also increases in size.
The problem that then begins to emerge over time, especially when data is restored at sites other than the primary site or during disaster recoveries, is that companies need to first restore the backup software's catalog before they can restore any data at the remote site. How long this takes will depend on the backup software product in question as well as the size of the backup software catalog though I have heard stories that this catalog restore can take 24 hours or more to complete.
But not every product manages its backup software catalog this way. To mitigate this problem and track backup data regardless of where it is located or on what type of media, the CommVault® Simpana® software suite uses a distributed index. CommVault keeps a small MS SQL 2005 DB on the CommServer with pointers to a component of the index retained with each backup job. To recover the data, all that companies need is the CommVault Simpana server software installed at the recovery site, a copy of the small ER Backup of the SQL 2005 DB and the media (disk, tape or optical) with a copy of the Job on it.
The Simpana software then reads the data regardless of what kind of media it is stored on (disk, optical or tape) or how it got to the recovery site (Simpana may have vaulted the data or a disk subsystem may have replicated the backup job to another system at the remote site). In either case, Simpana can reconstruct the backup job and the data in it regardless of the type of media it resides based upon the information found in the index of each backup job.
The plethora of media types to which companies can store backup data and the way that data can be managed after it is backed up has mushroomed in the last few years. All of these options to store and move backup data are creating exciting new possibilities for driving down the ongoing costs of data management as well as opening new doors for data recoveries. But if companies forget to concern themselves with how to track and locate this data in an effective, efficient manner as they move it from media to media and site to site and not use a product that addresses these issues, they should not have a great deal of confidence that when it comes time to find and recover the data that they can recover it as quickly as the business may expect or need.
]]>Jerome: What are some of the initial questions and surveys that CommVault uses to gather data when it goes into a new customer account?
Robert: The CommVault Professional Services (PS) team follows a series of information gathering steps to first document the customer environment. CommVault initially sends an email to the customer's account team so he or she can gather preliminary technical information about that customer's environment. Once that information is gathered, the team does a risk assessment of the client account as well as a gap analysis so it can close those information gaps in the customer account. The team then meets with the customer to identify and set expectations plus gather the final information it needs about the customer's environment. At this point, the PS team has a thorough baseline to work from as it builds out and deploys the software in the customer environment.
Jerome: As CommVault grows its Services (PS) and Technical Support organization, how is it leveraging the information and insight it gains from past and current projects to improve the process going forward?
Robert: One of CommVault's objectives is to leverage the experience we gain at each customer account and make that experience extensible throughout our services and support organization so we can use that regardless of where our customers are located. By doing this, CommVault can treat every customer as a special project and not try to fit them into one specific mode.
Let me explain. CommVault recently did a global implementation with a company that had locations in multiple geographies around the world. While some sites were obviously in North America, the company also had remote offices in locations such as Africa and the South Pacific. The biggest challenge we find in accounts like these is that the company often does not have enterprise data management standards, especially at its remote locations. So as part of the implementation we need to create standards that are suitable for these remote offices.
This is easier said than done. In this particular case, some of these remote offices only received supplies (new tapes, computer equipment, etc.) on a quarterly basis which had to be flown in so CommVault had to adapt the client's backup processes to the reality of each of these sites. To facilitate this, CommVault provides a worldwide portal to which every CommVault engineer has access. Using this portal, engineers can search for like circumstances in previous customer engagements and use that knowledge when configuring and supporting new environments. In these remote offices, CommVault was able to take the reliability of the backups from under 50% to nearly 90% which is fairly good considering the environment in which they need to operate.
Jerome: What about CommVault's VARs? Are customers better served by buying directly from CommVault or can they expect similar levels of support when buying from VARs?
Robert: CommVault applies the same standards to our partners as it applies to its engineers. To facilitate this, CommVault gives them access to the same information that its engineers have access to. CommVault also offers boot camps for engineers so whether a customer calls CommVault or a CommVault partner, they should have the same type of experience since they have access to the same information and tools to which CommVault's engineers have access.
Jerome: What is your vision for the future of this group?
Robert: No customer wants to hear from the Professional Services or Technical Support team that the product is broken and we are working on a fix. Instead CommVault wants its customers to assume that the product works. If they view it that way, they can think about their data from a more holistic perspective. This allows customers to understand what data they have and where it is so they can access it when they need it. As part of doing that, companies need to better understand the product that they are using and how to use it. Our objective is to help them accomplish that by helping them convert the data they manage into information that they can use to run their business. By having a co-joined Services and Technical Services team, CommVault can move its clients closer to this goal.
Part 1 of this series examined the new challenges facing CommVault's Professional Services and Technical Support teams as it engages prospective customers and how this is changing the customer experience with backup software.
]]>Anyone who is even remotely close to the data storage management and enterprise security management disciplines within companies knows that about the only overlap that often occurs between these two departments is during internal meetings. There is mutual respect for each other and sometimes even high-level discussions about working more closely together but, to date, cooperation between these two teams remains at the surface level simply because there are no internal forces working to make this a reality.
Now, new forces for these two disciplines to cooperate have emerged, primarily driven by corporate legal departments. Revisions in 2006 to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have necessitated changes in the scope, speed and thoroughness of how companies perform eDiscoveries as well as retain data subject to legal holds. Furthermore, increased enforcement of laws such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and SEC Rules 17-a3 & 17-a4 is creating a new onus for security and storage to work as one.
The pressure is largely coming from corporate legal departments. When government auditors or third party legal counsels show up at corporate offices, they of course go first to the corporate legal departments to ask for proof of compliance or specific electronic records, not corporate security or storage departments. In order to respond to these requests, the company legal department immediately turns to its company's IT security and storage departments who are often ill-equipped to produce the data, where it currently resides, or any type of common audit log that documents how they have managed the data or who has had access to it over the last few years.
Avoiding these types of corporate fire drills is the initial impetus behind the strategic partnership that CommVault and McAfee have now formed. In order to produce audit logs and dashboards depicting how their data is managed, CommVault and McAfee are going to integrate their two products with the first level of integration to occur using the McAfee ePolicy Ochestrator (ePO) interface and scheduled for release in early 2009.
ePO was chosen as the portal to present this information based on feedback that CommVault and McAfee independently received from their respective customer bases. Legal departments initially look to corporate security software such as McAfee ePO to track information on corporate data movement and changes to data security policies even if it is the storage management team doing the data movement and setting the security policies. The McAfee ePO will take advantage of CommVault APIs to obtain auditing and policy metadata from the CommVault® Simpana® software suite so that companies can use ePO as a common portal to monitor and report on such tasks as: the success and failure rates of backup jobs; changed backup and/or storage management policies; identify backup jobs that ran when they should not have; confirm tapes are taken offsite and returned; and, identify servers that are not being backed up.
Corporate legal departments are under increasing pressure to produce information quickly that is reliable and authoritative that can satisfy external compliance and eDiscovery requests and internal fire drills do not cut it anymore. To meet these emerging requirements, corporate storage and security teams need to actually work together in a more formal way and produce the information that is needed to satisfy these requests without breaking either corporate budgets or processes. This new strategic partnership between CommVault and McAfee and the forthcoming integration between their respective software products will provides a new mechanism for this to occur. Security and storage teams can now efficiently and effectively meet the expectations of internal legal departments while still allowing these two disciplines to maintain a high level of autonomy within their company.
]]>This question of enterprise caliber professional services and technical support is one that CommVault® Systems has addressed as its Simpana® software suite makes inroads into more enterprise accounts. But as it does, CommVault is finding the need to evolve its Professional Services (PS) and Technical Support organizations to support these accounts. To understand how CommVault is doing so, I recently had the opportunity to meet with Robert Brower, CommVault's VP of Services and Technical Support, Americas, to discuss this topic.
Jerome: What are the new challenges that CommVault faces as it provides services and support for today's enterprise organizations?
Robert: In the enterprise backup software space, there are no more green fields left (i.e. - CommVault no longer expects to enter a new account and not find it with one or more versions of enterprise backup software). CommVault has adapted the nature of its Services and Technical Support as to how it approaches global enterprise customers. It needs to help companies transition from their current backup software to CommVault's Simpana suite. To do so requires that client engagements sometimes begin before the customer ever signs on the dotted line.
The Services and Technical Support organization is now brought in early in the sales cycle to help explain to the CIO CommVault's value proposition. To a certain degree, a CIO does not care which backup product his company uses. So explaining how CommVault deploys its Simpana software in the company's environment in a timely manner has become an extraordinarily important part of the sales process.
Jerome: Since CommVault's Professional Services and Technical Support team is involved so early on in the sales process at the customer account, how does that change the customer experience?
Robert: CommVault's PS team's involvement early-on in the sales process gives us an edge when it comes times to deploy the software since we gain needed insight into the customer environment. The PS team documents what the customer requirements are to include what performance levels they expect, how resilient the supporting hardware for the Simpana software needs to be and what the customer's expectations are for problem resolution.
The PS team works with the customer account from build-out to deployment to ongoing management of the software. This becomes very important as the Technical Support team is subsequently brought into contact with the customer. The CommVault PS team shares the history of the customer environment with the Technical Support team to help the customer avoid any long term issues with CommVault. We want to avoid scenarios where we need to drop an engineer off at a customer site and then expect the engineer to fix the customer's problems. By having a history in place, if a CommVault engineer does need to get involved, the engineer already has a sense of what has occurred at that client account and how to best support it.
Part 2 of this series will focus on the processes that CommVault's Professional Services and Technical Support teams take when engaging customers.
]]>Over the last few months DCIG has observed a growing number of data protection appliances that bundle data protection software and storage capacity in a single solution. The reason these solutions are so attractive is that many small and midsize businesses, after all of this time, still either do not backup their data or backup their data using a variety of point products. While using deduplication appliances certainly helps these size businesses improve their backup and recovery times using their existing backup software, if they do not have backup software or are using multiple products, the management of this backup data becomes extremely problematic on the backside.
This new hardware/software bundle from Dell, powered by CommVault, begins to change this situation in a number of important ways.
The one differentiator between this and deduplication appliances that companies do need to take into consideration is that they will need to install a Simpana agent on the physical and virtual machines in their environment. However this task is usually not onerous in these environments since the number of machines is usually minimal (20 or less). Further, once the install is complete, upgrades to the agents are done via push technology so agent management does not become a burdensome, recurring task.
The last few years deduplication vendors have gone head-to-head with backup software vendors and have often ended up looking down at backup software providers. By CommVault partnering with Dell on this new solution, the view for dedupe vendor changes considerably. For the first time in awhile, they find themselves looking up at CommVault and needing to come up with a data protection and management story that rivals CommVault's. Right now, it is looking like a very short story.
]]>Recently I had a chance to chat with John Chirhart, an InfoReliance consultant to the federal government, about the burden that complying with these laws is putting upon US agencies. In his role, Chirhart acts as an advisor to federal departments that manage classified information and provides them guidance as to how to manage their environment so they can access and manipulate this data so it complies with existing federal rules and regulations.
The challenge that he sees these agencies facing right now in managing their data is two-fold:
The need to audit how data is managed - from what data is released or withheld, who has access to it, when it released, when it is deleted, how the software is managed and who has access to and manages the audit logs - is paramount in federal agencies. Auditors will sit down with customers and ask them to provide them this type of information surrounding their data management practices. These auditors will ask these agencies to demonstrate that certain software patches were applied, when they were applied, how frequently backups were done, if they completed successfully and if the backup logs support these claims. The auditor will also expect these agencies to prove that none of the information that they share with the auditor has been tampered with in any way.
The other challenge that these agencies face is establishing what data they had at their environment at some point in the past. An agency may discover that a data breach did occur at some point in the past. If that occurs, they need to try to establish when exactly that data breach occurred, what data existed in their environment at the time of the breach and who had access to it so they can determine the scope of the risk.
Since CommVault does end-to-end data management, CommVault can restore data to specific past points in time on different hardware. This helps his clients easily restore data to existing hardware and establish what data may have been at risk should it be determined a data breach occurred.
Audits, disaster recoveries and legal e-discoveries are now part of the world in which we live and no organization (private or public) is immune from them. Chirhart sees that while the ways different organizations may need to comply, the similar manner in which companies must manipulate and manage their data are now, in essence, almost universal and he sees the CommVault Simpana software suite as being a great way for companies to address these needs. "The legal department should be the biggest advocate or champion within any company for this product," says Chirhart. With a few more consultants like Chirhart speaking their mind, it may not be long before that occurs.
]]>To help organizations and providers establish best practices around the eDiscovery process, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) was created to help outline the key processes involved for eDiscovery and provide users with a methodology that helps them reduce cost, time, and manual intervention.
The recent Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery survey identified the need for standards as the number one issue affecting the industry of eDiscovery. The results from this survey acted as a catalyst in the creation of the EDRM and continue to drive the EDRM in the update and expansion of the processing model for eDiscovery. Ongoing developments within the EDRM is supported by a group of users, corporate legal teams, IT managers, law firms, consultants, service providers, and emerging software providers such as CommVault.
Over the last couple years, CommVault has emerged as a major player in the eDiscovery marketplace. CommVault focuses on advanced data management technologies that index and manage data as it is created which drives improved information access and search methodologies within organizations. CommVault's decision to participate in both the EDRM and The Sedona Conference RFP+ Vendor Panel is driven by what it sees as a need to clearly differentiate itself in the marketplace with its strategy of proactively indexing data while helping to educate the industry as a whole about new and improved methods to perform e-discoveries. The CommVault® Simpana® suite consists of a breadth of capabilities though its most notable features include:
Yet what is undoubtedly the biggest differentiator that CommVault brings to the table, and most notable reason for CommVault participating in the EDRM, is its emphasis on how companies should perform e-discoveries. eDiscovery is typically done forensically after a request for an eDiscovery is received by the company. This forces an organization to respond reactively by searching its archived data stores. This approach limits search speeds, increases costs, and reduces a company's effectiveness in accessing and data searched and then forces it to introduce new procedures to hold and manage the data after it is located. In contrast, CommVault's proactive implementation of building indexes as part of key processes within an organization, such as backup processing or archiving, shifts organizations from a reactive to a proactive mindset of data management by enabling them to perform e-discoveries if and when eDiscovery requests are received.
Attacking instead of responding to e-discoveries represents a fundamental shift in the way that most people think about eDiscovery. But to bring about this change in thinking will not happen by accident. It is only through providers like CommVault participating in the EDRM, educating end-users about these new eDiscovery methods and then end-users adopting products that manage data from cradle-to-grave in a risk-averse manner will such a change ever occur.
]]>That is what puts today's announcement from CommVault® Systems that it is now a member of The Green Grid in some perspective. From a simplistic perspective, there is no reason for a software company to necessarily promote "Green" hardware because it sells zero hardware. However by taking the initiative to join The Green Grid, it provides further evidence that companies are starting to take more variables into account when measuring "Green" and that the trend towards green computing is more than just buying the newest hardware. If anything, as software vendors like CommVault embrace "Green", it sends a more definitive signal that companies are becoming more serious about proper data management techniques and willing to make real changes in how they manage their data going forward.
To discuss this change in customer mindset as well as gain some further insight on today's announcement, I had a chance to catch up with Mike Marchi, CommVault's VP of Product and Segment Marketing. Marchi noted that CommVault has been evaluating joining and participating in The Green Grid for some time and today's announcement is simply the culmination of those efforts.
But as part of that effort, CommVault commissioned its own study where it talked to nearly 600 end-users to better understand why "Green IT" is taking on more importance in their organizations. The full results of this study are available in a recently published white paper on CommVault's web site and it cites three major reasons why companies now realize that they need to take a more proactive role in the management of data. These reasons include:
Marchi firmly believes that companies are reaching an inflection point when it comes to the management of data in their data centers. While he still recognizes that changes in data management practices will not occur all at once in any corporation, his comments coincide with what I am observing and hearing more often in conversations - companies know deep down that they cannot keep throwing hardware at their data management problems. In fact, some organizations are already internally getting push back from some unlikely places. "Pressure is coming from corporate Facility groups that are running out of power, running out of cooling and can't build out anymore," says Marchi.
Companies are under intense pressure to save money while still growing their company and the applications that run them. Today's rising energy costs and heightened sensitivity about social responsibility are forcing companies to come to grips that they need to do more than just buy the latest, greatest version of hardware and call that "Green IT".
As this study from CommVault points out, "Green IT" now equates to "Smart, responsible IT". This increasingly means companies need to put in place data management software that not only gives them visibility into their data but enables them to manage, and even reduce, how much data and hardware they need in their data center while better utilizing what they already own. And if that isn't green in every sense of the word, I don't know what is.
]]>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.
]]>In any case, this year's attendees at Microsoft Tech-Ed can thank, Brittanie De Meno the 15-year-old daughter of CommVault's Chief Evangelist, Randy De Meno, for one of its more memorable gimmicks: "flip-flops". Since Tech-Ed was held in Orlando, she proposed that CommVault give away flip-flops since that was something that everyone traveling there could use but probably didn't think to pack. However there was a catch. To get a pair of flip-flops, attendees had to stop by two booths: CommVault and Sun Microsystems. Each booth had one flip of the flop (or flop of the flip as the case may be) so to receive a pair of flip-flops, users had to stop by both booths and hear a short presentation from each company before they would receive a pair of flip-flops.
Of course, maybe the flip-flops are symbolic of the changing nature of the CommVault and Sun Microsystems relationship over the past decade. In 1998 when CommVault was coming to market with the software that is now the CommVault® Simpana® software suite, it had to make a choice as to what platform would host its software: Either continue with Unix operating systems like Sun Solaris or switch to Microsoft Windows. When it decided to develop its core data management software on the Microsoft Windows platform and just provide support for UNIX operating systems, Sun and CommVault parted ways.
Over the next decade, nothing much changed in the relationship. While there was no specific animosity between CommVault and Sun, the fact that there was so much personal animosity between Microsoft and Sun at their respected leadership positions filtered down to the rank-and-file employees and even, to a certain degree, to their respective partners. So beyond the cordial "Hello's" and "How do you dos", CommVault and Sun continued to stay at arm's length.
It is only in the last couple of years that things began to change, in part precipitated by a changing of the guard at the leadership helms in both of these companies and that Randy stayed in contact with 2 longtime Sun executives that he worked with back in the 1990s; Sun's Chief Technologist for storage Art Licht and Sun's Chief Scientist, Hal Stern. New people brought new attitudes into both of these companies and with it the recognition that even the unthinkable might be possible: synergies between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. This would be accomplished by running Microsoft's new 64-bit software on Sun's 64-bit hardware.
Why the flip-flop on Sun's part in regards to Microsoft? Love or hate Microsoft, Microsoft is in nearly every corporation and Windows is, for the most part, hardware agnostic. Sun also is in most major corporations but was watching Microsoft Windows erode its market share running on hardware from it competitors. That's when the lights came on Sun. Sun realized that, yes, it sells Sun Solaris but, on a larger scale, it is putting a lot more emphasis in becoming a solutions company and its hardware could support Microsoft Windows. By selling Microsoft Windows running on its hardware, it could increase its sales as well.
So what does this all have to do with CommVault and Sun Microsystems giving away flip-flops at Microsoft Tech-Ed? Simple. The CommVault Simpana software suite is entirely based and optimized on 64-bit architectures. However to take full advantage of CommVault's code, companies need 64-bit hardware that supports Microsoft Windows 64-bit software.
Many companies are planning to adopt Microsoft Windows Server 2008 as well as other 64-bit application software from Microsoft (Exchange Server 2007, SharePoint Server 2007, etc). However to optimize its performance and data management capabilities, Microsoft needed hardware partners that could take advantage of 64-bit software, hence the new relationship between Sun and CommVault.
It's also obvious that Microsoft had a hand in the new CommVault/Sun alliance as they have hosted over 30 seminars in the past 12 months at Microsoft offices where Microsoft focused on Exchange/SharePoint, CommVault on Data Management and Sun (yes, Sun field people presenting at Microsoft offices) presenting about their hardware.
The flip-flop giveaway by CommVault and Sun was a hit among Tech-Ed attendees but it also carried with it a larger message as well. Two companies (three if you count Microsoft) that had previously a limited partnership with one another are now finding common ground that may give end-users new reasons to do a flip-flop of their own. Because as corporate data stores grow and performance expectations climb, companies need more performance and capacity. Having access to a newly integrated, end-to-end 64-bit software and hardware infrastructure option from CommVault, Microsoft and Sun provides these companies with a new option that may prompt a similar change in their buying habits.
]]>Despite the dearth of new product announcements from Microsoft, CommVault's Chief Microsoft Evangelist, Randy De Meno, found no shortage of users to talk to at the conference. Randy and the CommVault team that he had on hand are still compiling their notes from the conversations they had with the hundreds of IT professionals who stopped by CommVault's booth. Official numbers from Microsoft Tech-Ed had the tally at over 9,500 IT professionals in attendance and, to hear Randy tell it, all but 10 or 11 of them stopped by CommVault's booth.
Of course, exhibiting at Microsoft Tech-Ed is nothing new for CommVault. It has done so for at least a decade and this year, like every year, Randy found that he continued to learn as much from the users attending the conference as he hopes they learned from him.
Part of the reason Randy particularly enjoys meeting users at Microsoft Tech-Ed is that hard-core Microsoft techies flock to this event. These are the individuals who administer Microsoft's products on a daily basis and have a firm handle on the strengths of Microsoft's products but also understand its shortcomings. As a result, they can articulate at the technical level the specific challenges that they are facing and/or are beginning to encounter on a day-to-day basis. These individuals Randy specifically looks forward to meeting because in the past they have provided him significant insight as to what specific new features that the company needs to introduce into the CommVault® Simpana® software suite to meet new clients' needs as well as keep existing clients satisfied.
Randy specifically points to a number of ways that Simpana 7.0 software integrates with Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint as being a direct result of input he has received while attending past Microsoft Tech-Ed events, including enhancements to :
Microsoft Tech-Ed is about more than just new product releases. While it certainly serves that purpose, it gives vendors and users alike to connect on a more personal level and can give vendors needed insight into what problems users are really having so they can innovate more quickly. It also gives users the opportunity to scope out and identify those vendors that are listening and being responsive to their needs. In some respects, no new Microsoft product announcements at Tech-Ed 2008 are almost a blessing in disguise.
Microsoft Tech-Ed is a great opportunity for users and vendors to connect. But users need to do more than connect, they need to use this show as opportunity to identify those vendors that are stepping up to the plate that solve the problems they are having today as well as anticipating the problems that they will have in the future. The fact that CommVault puts such emphasis on bringing its top developers to Tech-Ed so these connections can occur should contribute to giving users continued confidence that CommVault is as interested in solving your problems tomorrow as it is today.
]]>However some of the issues that CommVault® Systems' Senior Director of Information and Access Management, Simon Taylor, is encountering when archiving data are becoming more esoteric in nature. CommVault is used by businesses around the globe and the challenges it is starting to encounter go well beyond just archiving data stored on network file servers or Exchange email systems. Globally companies are being asked to manage archived data on a more granular level to satisfy specific laws.
Jerome: I have heard the term "agility" used in conjunction with archiving data. Why do companies need to concern themselves with data agility within their archived data stores?
Simon: Despite what people may think, archiving changes constantly. Laws are constantly changing which can force companies to re-classify data they had previously archived under a different set of rules or policies. Legal holds are creating new sets of problems of companies. Now you must add another set of retention and management rules on top of rules that you already have in place. These new rules may only apply to a subset of the data. Legal holds require companies to take segments of the information that are managing now, group it separately and then manage it by this separate set of policies.
The situation is more complicated in Europe. In Europe, individuals have a lot of rights to the data that companies retain about them. For instance, in the UK under its Freedom of Information Act, an individual can pay $20 and request that a company provide that individual with all of the information that it has about that individual. The company not only has to produce the information it has about that individual in 10 business days, companies are also subject to the EU Data Protection Directive. This requires companies to delete copies of that data that the individual wants removed. This includes all copies of the data across the company to include archived and backup data stores.
Adding to the complexity, companies need to keep records about hazmat (hazardous material) incidents. In those circumstances, companies may need to keep this information on an individual for specific hazmat related requests in the archives while restricting access to the information for any other purpose.
Jerome: This trend towards individuals having a say-so in what information companies keep about them - how do you see this impacting corporate management of archived data?
Simon: Individuals will have much more influence and companies will need to be flexible enough to comply. In the US, things are already changing to give individuals more say-so as to what data companies can keep about them. What this all means is that companies can not assume decisions made today are set in stone. Circumstances can change in 8 - 10 years and they will need to adapt to those changes. This is the big change in archiving: it needs to adapt to change.
Part 1 in this 3-part series took a look at the forthcoming paradigm shift that needs to occur in information management.
Part 2 in this 3-part interview series took a look at how CommVault's SIS facilitates information management and access as well as how CommVault works with hardware vendors that do block-based deduplication.
]]>Jerome: I've examined CommVault System's implementation of SIS in the past but primarily looked at the benefits of SIS and deduplication from the perspective of capacity and space savings. What benefits does SIS offer when other factors like information search and data mobility are considered?
Simon: Regardless of which product (archiving or backup software) that one uses within CommVault's Simpana suite, these products store data in the same object store. While storing data in this format consumes more space than when deduplicating data at the block level, by retaining each file in its entirety and treating it as an object, certain permissions such as read, write, delete and retention can be assigned to this object (or file). This creates some interesting possibilities from an information search and data mobility perspective.
Consider this first from an information search perspective. Data that is deduplicated (block-based or SIS), may be indexed when it is initially stored. However a problem that can arise is that files may need to be re-indexed later on (new laws, new search criteria, etc.). In circumstances where files are deduplicated at the block level, to re-index these files may require that the files first be reconstituted before they can be re-indexed. Stored in a SIS format, companies do not need to worry about the overhead and wait times that reconstituting the data would introduce to re-index the data.
Now consider it from a data mobility perspective. Most companies still use tape in some fashion in their data protection and archiving scheme. However the problem with tape is that you cannot store deduplicated data on tape. If moving deduplicated data from disk to tape, the data must again be reconstituted before storing it on tape. SIS again avoids this scenario since the file is stored in its entirety on disk so companies can more easily move data from disk to tape with minimal performance impact or wait times. In fact, companies can opt to migrate large files within their SIS repository to tape as a means to keep their costs down.
Jerome: So how do you explain the large number of partnerships that CommVault has with vendors that provide archiving and deduplicating products if SIS provides so many benefits?
Simon: CommVault currently has partnerships with many vendors that resell archiving and deduplicating solutions: Data Domain, EMC (Centera), HDS (HCAP), HP Integrated Archive Platform, IBM DR550, NetApp SnapLock, Permabit Enterprise Archive and Plasmon UDO Archive Appliance just to name a few. We can support all of these platforms without spending a great degree of time integrating their products with ours because of CommVault's architecture. It provides sufficient flexibility so that users can select whatever technology best fits their requirements.
Because of this, we see certain synergies emerging from these partnerships as organizations today will typically implement a tiered infrastructure with most companies using a least a couple of storage tiers. A specific benefit we see is companies using CommVault to facilitate the introduction of Green IT into their organization.
"Green IT" is becoming an important component of many companies' IT strategies. In the US, Green IT is primarily about saving power while, for the rest of the world, saving power is also part of their objective but it is also about social responsibility and achieving higher degrees of efficiency. These other solutions allow companies to meet those objectives while they use CommVault as their primary means to search and move data across these different storage tiers.
Part 1 in this series took a look at the forthcoming paradigm shift that needs to occur in information management.
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.
]]>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 2 in this 3-part interview series with Simon will take a look at how CommVault's SIS facilitates information management and access as well as how CommVault works with hardware vendors that do block-based deduplication.
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.
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