CommVault® Systems tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2007-09-06://22 2010-08-09T01:48:09Z CommVault® is determined to develop a better paradigm to manage data. A paradigm that would not attempt merely to "integrate" disparate solutions, but would spawn solutions designed to work together from a single, infinitely-adaptable code. A paradigm that would not merely address current data management needs, but that would anticipate and meet needs yet to come. The paradigm would be more accessible, adaptable, flexible and powerful than any data management solution to date. That paradigm is defined as Solving Forward. CommVault® Systems, Inc. DCIG is paid a fee by CommVault® Systems, Inc. in connection with this blog. CommVault® undertakes no obligation to update, correct or modify any statements contained in this blog; these statements represent the views and opinions of DCIG only. Movable Type 4.1 The New Deduplication Debate: Where to Draw the Line on Deduplication tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2010://22.1718 2010-08-09T10:00:00Z 2010-08-09T10:00:00Z Not that many years ago the debate around how to best deduplicate data centered on inline versus post processing deduplication as data was archived or backed up. While that debate still simmers, a new one is brewing that was spurred in part by the recent announcement that Dell plans to acquire Ocarina Networks. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html announcement that Dell plans to acquire Ocarina Networks. This one touches on where organizations should draw the line on data deduplication.

In the last couple of years the business case for deduplicating archive and backup data, which is characterized by high levels of redundancy and infrequent access, has clearly been made. As organizations look to use disk as their primary target and/or medium for archive and backup, data deduplication drives down the cost of disk to the point where it is as economical as tape while providing the benefits of disk (successful backups and recoveries and less time to complete them).

But as one looks to move deduplication up the stack into primary storage such as what Dell is apparently looking to do by adding Ocarina Networks' technology to its line of EqualLogic storage system, where to draw the line on what data to deduplicate can start to get a little hazy.  While introducing deduplication onto primary storage systems can certainly reduce data stores and ultimately lower storage costs, there is no guarantee that deduplication is appropriate for all data residing on primary storage.

DCIG analyst James Koopmann argued that one form of data that organizations would be wise not to use the storage system deduplication feature is data found in databases. Databases that are properly designed deduplicate the data stored in them as a matter of course using a technique called normalization. This is done to eliminate the redundancies that otherwise creep into database as well as to facilitate quick retrieval of information.
 
Koopmann even argues that if a storage system vendor promises that it can reduce the storage capacity used by a database through deduplication then the database administrator should be concerned about the quality of the underlying database design. He say, "Reducing the storage requirements for databases through deduplication just puts a Band-Aid on this problem and does not address the real issue."

However proper use cases for introducing deduplication on primary storage do exist and it is one of these that is driving Dell's interest in Ocarina networks. The two best use cases I have heard to date for using deduplication on primary storage is on file servers and in virtualized server environments.
 
In the first use case, deduplicating data on file servers, it is unclear how Dell may leverage Ocarina's technology. While Ocarina Networks technology has the ability to do this, Dell does not really play in the enterprise NAS space so whatever benefits that Ocarina Networks provides to Dell is this regards appear to be merely coincidental at this point in time.

The second use case, deduplicating virtualized server images, appears to be the logicrole that Ocarina Networks will eventually fulfill within Dell. Dell's EqualLogic storage systems are known if for nothing else their ability to deliver iSCSI SANs and iSCSI as a protocol is wildly popular in virtualized server environments right now.
 
So Dell's decision to acquire Ocarina Networks only makes sense since up to 90% of the data in virtualized server images may be redundant. Deduplicating these virtual server images reduces the amount of virtual server data stored and should serve to improve performance of virtual machines since their images can now be more easily and economically stored on high performance storage from Dell such as its PS6010XVS.

But as deduplication finds its way onto more primary storage systems it does not mean that organizations should redraw the line of how they use deduplication within their environment to exclude archive and backup.
 
CommVault's Dave West makes the point in a recent blog entry that copies of data used in archive and backup as well as for compliance and replication consume orders of magnitude more storage capacity than what the original copy of data on primary storage consumes. This is a problem that deduplication on primary storage does not solve. Rather he argues that using software to deduplicate  data across all tiers to include disk, tape and even emerging storage clouds such as CommVault does slashes storage costs and is key to optimizing storage space and performance across the entire storage infrastructure.

Deduplication is appearing at almost every level of the storage stack and, as it does, the line that enterprises draw as to what data is deduplicated is clearly moving up the stack to now include such applications as file services and server virtualization.

However organizations should not confuse the growing use of deduplication on primary storage as a replacement for proper storage management practices. The introduction of deduplication on primary storage moves the line but does eliminate the need for it where it is already used. If anything because deduplication will enable so much more data to be efficiently stored on primary storage, the need for a comprehensive software-based deduplication solution such as what CommVault offers may be greater now than ever before. ]]> A Cloud is a Cloud is a Cloud: HDPS Powered by CommVault Steps up to Deliver a Singular Storage Cloud tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2010://22.1561 2010-06-29T17:00:00Z 2010-06-29T17:00:00Z Substantial technical differences exist between how the interfaces of storage clouds are presented, managed and secured. But from a business point of view, a cloud is a cloud is a cloud and the sooner that the technical challenges associated with managing these different storage clouds from a single platform are overcome, the sooner that businesses can ramp up their cloud storage adoption. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html HDPS) powered by CommVault that we see today.
 
It is no secret that organizations want to take advantage of cloud computing in general and are rapidly moving in that direction. For example, one third of healthcare providers already claim to be using cloud applications with that percentage of healthcare providers expected to grow to 73% by the end of 2010. Gartner also forecasts that business expenditures on cloud services are expected to approach $68.3 billion in 2010 and jump to nearly $150 billion by 2014.

The trouble with any cloud solution and specifically a cloud storage solution is navigating the transition from today's siloed storage stacks to tomorrow's cloud storage solutions. Today's in-house storage solutions are:

  • Complex, customized and expensive to manage
  • Intended for specific integrated application stacks
  • Require large in-house IT teams to manage them
Conversely, tomorrow's cloud storage solutions are expected to be:

  • More economical
  • Automated while simplifying the backend data and storage management
  • Less cumbersome needing fewer IT staff to manage them
It can already be said that today's cloud storage solutions are doing a good job of delivering on this first requirement of becoming more economical. Already the cost per GB associated with cloud storage solutions is in the pennies per month range and there is no reason to believe that those costs will do anything but decline in the years to come.  Yet when it comes to making storage clouds easier to manage, automating the movement of data and reducing the time to manage them; those solutions are typically still in the works.

That said, there are those solutions that are definitely ahead of the pack in terms of creating and delivering a singular storage cloud and HDPS powered by CommVault falls into that category. HDPS has for some time supported both disk and tape targets, the automated, policy-driven movement of data across different tiers of storage and even interfaced with private clouds that offer CIFS and NAS interfaces.

Today's announcement of Hitachi Cloud Service for Private File Tiering brings the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) and HDPS together to provide seamless movement of data into the clouds to HDPS. This helps users in three ways as it pertains to them creating and managing a singular storage cloud.

First, HCP scales to over 40 PBs of storage capacity. In addition to the steadily growing amounts of email and file data that every organization has to manage, more organizations are deploying desktop virtualization, adopting social media for collaboration and information exchange, installing video surveillance systems and creating endless amounts of web content.

This puts them in a position where they will need to deploy massively scalable storage systems that are not bound by traditional file system and volume management software limitations. HCP gives organizations this flexibility to grow and scale their storage as needed.

Second, HCP uses an object store. Object store architectures are viewed by many as the primary architecture that public storage clouds will use in the not-too-distant future for a majority of their data storage.

Third, it makes the cloud more flexible. One of the complaints about private storage clouds has been the upfront investment that they require. Hitachi Cloud Services for Private File Tiering removes many of those concerns as it can start small with a minimal investment so users can scale its capacity and pay for what they need when they need. Further, since HDPS is used to manage the entire cloud, it can forecast when additional storage capacity is needed and then dynamically move the data into the cloud after the additional storage capacity is installed and available.

The corporate adoption of cloud infrastructures is fully underway but this is putting new pressure on organizations to identify solutions that enable them to take full advantage of the cost benefits they offer. Today's announcement that HDPS is an integrated part of the new private file tiering solution is just another indication that it is possible for organizations to do more than just deploy economical cloud storage solutions but also effectively manage them so they can fully realize the cost savings they provide.

Further, by organizations using platforms like HDPS powered by CommVault, they are well positioned to take advantage of new cloud storage options as they become available so that no matter what type of cloud they need, it becomes a singular cloud to manage from a data and storage management perspective.
]]> CommVault ROMS Extends Customer Satisfaction to Service and Support tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2010://22.1501 2010-06-03T10:00:00Z 2010-06-03T10:00:00Z Standing in the way of progress is the inability of organizations to cost-effectively provide the expertise and 24X7 coverage that this emerging backup infrastructure needs. It is this gap that the CommVault Remote Operations Management Service (ROMS) has been closing since its introduction in 2009. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html ROMS) has been closing since its introduction in 2009. As it does, it is raising the bar in terms of how enterprise will measure the delivery of service and support offerings going forward.

The Backup Redesign Balancing Act

Backup redesign has once again shown up near the top of The InfoPro Wave 13 heat index with nearly 30% of users naming it as one of their top storage initiatives for 2010.  Organizations continue to list disk-based backup in its three primary iterations (deduplication, replication replacing backup software and VTLs) as a storage technology that they anticipate impacting their storage architecture this year.
 
Yet tiered storage build outs, technology refreshes, consolidations and server virtualization are other initiatives that these organizations are also looking to deploy. These technologies put strains on existing backup designs plus they need their own set of organizational resources to service and support them. So for organizations seeking to justify and balance the deployment of a backup redesign solution with these other priorities, they need a backup solution that meets the demands of these other initiatives without introducing its own set of services and support overhead.

CommVault Simpana with ROMS

Those who are familiar with CommVault® Simpana® software already know that it offers a singular, integrated approach for protecting data in the virtualized data center of tomorrow. Archiving, backup, compression, deduplication, eDiscovery, replication, search and server virtualization data protection are just some of the features that it now supports in anticipation of these emerging needs.

But since the introduction of ROMS in 2009, CommVault has been raising the bar for the delivery of services and support for CommVault users. 

One of the key changes that CommVault ROMS makes to the services and support model used by its competitors is its introduction of real-time monitoring and management. The monitoring and management of an organization's CommVault implementation are performed by trained CommVault engineers who typically work for a value added reseller (VAR) or even CommVault.

To accomplish this level of integration, monitoring and management, ROMS runs as a native service on the CommVault Simpana CommServe backup server so it can take advantage of its security privileges. It uses these permissions to directly communicate with Simpana's Common Technology Engine (CTE), gather information and then send it offsite.

It is because this level of security exists that organizations can grant either a trusted partner or CommVault itself the appropriate level of permissions so they can in real time leverage ROMS to access, monitor, manage and service an organization's backup environment.

ROMS Brings the Cost Justification to Backup Redesign

The native integration that ROMS has with Simpana delivers the immediate as well as the long term dollar savings that enterprises are looking for so they can justify proceeding with their backup redesign initiatives.

Absent a feature like ROMS, enterprises may need to add up to 2 - 3 full time employees (FTEs) to manage and support a central backup redesign architecture such as what CommVault supports. Even then these individuals will not be CommVault experts as they generally must call upon either their VAR or CommVault support for any sophisticated issue that they encounter or need to resolve.

Using CommVault ROMS changes the structure of the services and support model in two important ways.

First, enterprises do not need to dedicate FTEs to monitor and manage their backup environment. ROMS enables them to outsource the monitoring and management of their backup environment to either a VAR or CommVault who can monitor and manage this environment. Since CommVault support is available 24x7, 365 days a year, organizations do not necessarily need to retain FTEs to monitor and manage their backup environment.

Second, the average cost of ROMS for many of these environments starts in the $2500 - $5000 per year range. This price range generally includes a sufficient number of licenses for organizations to use ROMs to monitor and manage their most mission critical application servers with the flexibility to add more ROMS licenses if needed. This is a fraction of the cost of what it might cost an enterprise to hire staff to manage this backup infrastructure.

Proactive Backup Infrastructure Optimization Gives ROMS Teeth

Monitoring and managing backups is great but what gives ROMS its teeth is its ability to move an organization to the next level by providing them the information they need to proactively optimize their backup infrastructure.

Using ROMS means organizations no longer necessarily have to wait until a backup job or tape drive fails. Because of the tight integration that ROMS has with CommVault Simpana and its CTE, any disk or tape device managed by Simpana can be rendered by ROMS. This eliminates the need for ROMS to use MIBs and traps to gather information associated with each physical device.

Now by simply querying Simpana for the information it needs when it needs it, it is very straightforward for ROMS to pull back that information. Once ROMS has it, ROMS can then use it to monitor the health and efficiency of the entire backup ecosystem as well as analyze errors so it can predict when a backup job or tape drive is prone to fail.

In the case of tape libraries, anyone (local or remote) who is using ROMS can administer it. Once a tape library is selected, ROMS displays all of the tape drives in the tape library and lets the administrator know their status (healthy, degraded, off-line, etc.)

However ROMS also captures and displays the efficiency level that the tape drive is running at and what errors are occurring. In this way ROMS is more than just another backup reporting tool.

While ROMS captures how much data is protected, how fast it is being protected and how reliably it is being protected, it also provides the additional details that organizations need to drive costs out of their backup infrastructure.

For instance, using ROMS an organization may ascertain that tape drives are being written to inefficiently or experiencing a large number of errors and then proactively take steps to optimize their backup environment. In this example correcting these problems may include increasing the number of backup jobs executing concurrently or replacing the tape drive that is experiencing errors.

CommVault ROMS Extends the Customer Satisfaction Experience to Services and Support

The era of backup pain is coming to an end in large part because of data management software like CommVault Simpana. However organizations still expect to internally handle the service and support their backup infrastructure. Yet many organizations make that assumption simply because it has never occurred to them that services and support can be delivered in another way.

Today's expanding backup environments are becoming both more complicated and labor intensive to manually manage so it is time to lay the foundation for the automation of backup monitoring and management as well as the outsourcing of services and support. CommVault ROMS with its 700+ customers, 400 customer requested feature enhancements and year's worth of experience in the field proves that its is well on its way to helping current and prospective customers reset their expectations around how storage providers deliver service and support.

Organizations using CommVault Simpana as their foundational data management and protection software have for some time been able to confidently manage and protect data in their environment. Now using CommVault ROMS, they can extend these same high levels of satisfaction and savings to the service and support of their backup environment.
]]> CommVault Nails it on Service and Support tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2010://22.1497 2010-06-01T12:30:00Z 2010-06-01T12:30:00Z Too often storage providers seem to think that "Services and Support" is just another way of saying "Skimp and Save". However more customers are seeing through this thin veil of deceit and holding storage providers more accountable for how well they deliver on this critical infrastructure component by making services and support a part of their buying decision. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html CommVault delivers a 97% customer satisfaction rating on service and support that it demonstrates that CommVault is nailing it on more than just its data management software.

One of the toughest valuations for any vendor to arrive at is the value of its service and support. Every vendor knows that they need to provide it but often this is one area where they think that if they skimp and save in this area, they hope their customers do not notice. Or if their customers do find out how bad their service and support is, they hope they find out after they have already purchased the product when there is little they can do about it.

Yet to say that service and support is somehow viewed as unimportant by customers is ridiculous. A previous blog entry that DCIG prepared on the subject of service and support resulted in thousands of page views and has gone on to become one of the most read blog entries on DCIG's website.

Reflecting back on my own experience when I was an end user at First Data, if a storage provider did not provide the level of service and support that First Data expected and needed, the storage provider was eliminated from consideration. So even though First Data never formally communicated that was why the storage provided was not awarded a bid, First Data dropped enough hints along the way that the storage provider got the message that it needed to get its services and support act together.

So providing good service and support may not always make sense when one looks it strictly from a financial perspective. However when one looks at service and support from a strategic perspective it quickly becomes evident that happy customers result in repeat sales.

It is this philosophy that has been driving CommVault since its inception as its service and support are as much behind its continued success as its CommVault® Simpana® data management software.

The satisfaction with CommVault's services and support is reflected in a recent fiscal 2010 technical support service survey where it achieved a 97 percent customer satisfaction rating. This is substantially above the industry average of 75 percent as reported in HDI's 2009 Practices Survey.

This technical support service survey was administered to CommVault users following the completion of a technical services incident and was intended to measure the knowledge of the CommVault support team as well as how quickly the customer's problem was resolved.

To achieve this high rating, CommVault services does a couple of things that distinguish itself from its competitors. First, this survey found that half of all incidents were closed within 24 hours. This in itself is rather remarkable considering that since Simpana is data management software, the source of the problem could come from almost anywhere and Simpana may not even be the root cause of the problem.

Second, CommVault follows the life of a trouble ticket from open to close. Unlike some other call center operations that require opening a trouble ticket during normal business hours and then re-opening a ticket with their support center after hours, CommVault employs a best practice approach that distributes incidents to its five globally dispersed data centers. This approach ensures around the clock support as well as a dispersion of trouble tickets to where there are support engineers available to work on their resolution.

Services and support tend to get downplayed in the broader picture of technology but make no mistake, most organizations are not at the bleeding edge of technology and it is unlikely that they are even at the leading edge. Rather most are just trying to hold their infrastructure together in such a way that it meets the day-to-day demands of the business.

To do that, they first need technology that works but no technology works perfectly in every circumstance and when it doesn't, they need their storage provider's service and support organization to be there to help them out. In the case of CommVault, it appears that even in those rare circumstances when its Simpana software stumbles, CommVault's service and support organization is there to put it back on track and is nailing it when it does.

]]> CommVault Users Poised to Benefit from Increased Clarity on Legal eDiscovery and Data Preservation Requirements tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2010://22.1341 2010-04-12T18:30:00Z 2010-04-12T18:30:00Z It is time for organizations to heed the calls to take a proactive position on data management and preservation. While the sirens have been wailing for a number of years about the risks of not putting in place a comprehensive data management solution, too many organizations have failed to heed these warnings. Now a recent landmark opinion has dramatically altered the data management and preservation landscape by making it a necessity for organizations to implement a comprehensive, singular data management solution like CommVault® Simpana®. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html Simpana®.
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Prior to January 15, 2010, when this opinion was penned by the Honorable Shira A. Scheindlin in the case of the Pension Comm Of the Univ. of Montreal Pension Plan v. Banc of Am. Secs, it could be argued that organizations lacked any clear direction as to how a court might apply terms such as "negligence", "gross negligence" or "willfulness in the discovery context" to a court case in which they were involved.  Judge Scheindlin states as much in her opinion when she writes,

"...I have found no clear definition of these terms in the context of discovery misconduct."
Now for the first time thanks to this 87 page opinion penned by Judge Scheindlin, this ambiguity starts to dissipate.  Shannon Smith, an attorney and Archiving and eDiscovery Specialist with CommVault Systems, states this in regards to Scheindlin's opinion:

"She (Scheindlin) issued such a lengthy opinion because litigants are still failing to heed her call in previous opinions regarding the importance of preservation.  In this particular opinion she goes the extra step of providing a very detailed framework for the standard of care that is expected of litigants (something that has been lacking until now). Although she is just one of a handful of respected jurists on this topic, it is very likely that other federal judges will leverage this standard of care going forward."
This level of guidance from the courts has been sorely needed and sought after by organizations for some time. Simply put, they need this level of guidance as to what the courts actually expect them to produce and adhere to from an eDiscovery and preservation perspective when they go to court. Otherwise the type and scope of the data management and preservation platform that they do put in place could be for naught if it fails to meet the court's expectations that have been rather nebulous and subjective until now.
 
Judge Scheindlin's detailed opinion sets the context for how organizations should proceed in terms of selecting and evaluating the appropriate software that meet the demands of the court. This opinion enables them to put an appropriate framework in place so they can have a reasonable level of confidence of meeting the court's expectations.

However Judge Scheindlin's opinion does more than just provide guidelines as best practices for what to do. It also comes with a stiff warning for both defendants and plaintiffs that fail to do so. Smith goes on to say in her thoughts about this opinion:

"Because we are dealing with a plaintiff here rather than a defendant, the failure to preserve was offensive to Scheindlin.
 She doesn't state it specifically but if a party is going to leverage the court system to pursue damages against another party, they should, at a minimum, have made an effort on their end to have their ducks aligned.  I think that Scheindlin wants to emphasize that preservation obligations begin EARLY, especially for plaintiffs."
The momentum around this opinion has been building significantly over the last 12 months in the whole area of preservation driven in part by planned and forthcoming updates to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). The ability to search for information and the ability to preserve it in a form that holds up under legal scrutiny remains a large challenge for many organizations that have lacked the impetus to take action because of a lack of clarity on this matter from the courts as to how best proceed.

This opinion by Judge Scheindlin is a key piece of the jigsaw puzzle that brings it all together for organizations. They now have the motivation and framework to select an appropriate solution while removing "best faith effort" arguments on the sides of both defendants and plaintiffs. This opinion defines what those "best faith efforts" should look like, what courts can reasonably expect companies to deliver and warns them what happens if they do not.

The good news is that software such as CommVault Simpana is already available that meets these now newly defined data management, eDiscovery and data preservation demands that the courts have just thrust upon every organization. CommVault Simpana enables organizations to deploy a single strategy that can manage and perform archiving, backup, eDiscovery, preservation, and search from a single web console. Further, Simpana acts as an enabler by providing companies a way to centrally manage their data in a controlled manner without negatively impacting other parts of the organization either financially or operationally.

The legal sirens have stopped wailing as the requirements for preservation are now upon us. Existing techniques of reactive eDiscovery and "best faith efforts" no longer work and organizations that cling to these philosophies are about to find themselves confronting unsympathetic judges who are more willing to deal harshly with those that have not complied.

Courts are no longer naïve about what today's technologies can do and are aware that solutions do exist that enable proactive data management, eDiscovery and preservation that can meet these new standards that they have just set forth with sanctions waiting for those that fail to comply. This is why this recent ruling acts as a point of demarcation between the past and future of data management. It highlights what is now required of organizations and why they must pursue it with solutions like CommVault Simpana poised to swiftly address them.
]]> CommVault Simpana Software Provides New Tactical Snapshot Edge with Comprehensive Singular Management tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2010://22.1294 2010-03-24T18:00:00Z 2010-03-24T18:00:00Z Today IT managers have to think about more than just buying products that only solve their tactical day-to-day problems. Increasingly they have to consider how any new solution that they implement solves their more strategic data center management problems as well. This is why IT managers should be encouraged by the newly announced snapshot integration between CommVault® Simpana® software and Dell EqualLogic midrange arrays. While this integration solves their pressing backup and recovery problems, Simpana gives IT managers a path to better managing their data long term as well. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html Simpana gives IT managers a path to better managing their data long term as well.

"Doing more with less" has been a part of the IT lexicon as long as I have been associated with IT. While adherence to this mantra ebbs and flows, it is holding up pretty well this time. As concerns about the strength of the economic recovery linger, maximizing data center efficiency, controlling costs and making employees as effective as possible remain top priorities.

These concerns are forcing data center managers to identify solutions that can both fix their current tactical problems while leaving them better positioned to manage their environment going forward. This is why CommVault's announcement to add the Simpana SnapProtectTM snapshot technology for Dell EqualLogic midrange arrays is so important as it enables them to accomplish competing objectives.

CommVault's support of Dell EqualLogic's snapshot feature in addition to its current support for EMC CLARiiON, EMC Symmetrix and NetApp FAS systems should come as no surprise. Since June 2009 CommVault and Dell have partnered to offer the PowerVault DL2100 that functions as a turnkey backup appliance which uses a version of Simpana that is customized for fast, simple deployments.
 
However in the year since the DL2100's release, the adoption of server virtualization and storage technologies such as the Dell EqualLogic midrange arrays has accelerated. The need for faster backups and recoveries of virtualized systems has led to IT managers wanting to take advantage of the snapshot feature that comes as a standard software feature on Dell EqualLogic arrays.

The bad news is that this snapshot feature is not necessarily easy to implement. Examples of new tasks that IT managers have to be prepared to do in order to successfully utilize it include:

  • Scripting. To take snapshots using the Dell EqualLogic array, IT managers have to write scripts that instruct the array to take snapshots of specific volumes and the times at which to take them.
  • Snapshot management. Snapshots cannot be taken and then forgotten about it. IT managers must track why snapshots were taken, who is using them and then delete them when no longer needed.
  • Creating application consistent snapshots. Taking snapshots of applications like Microsoft Exchange or Oracle means first acquiescing these applications otherwise the snapshots that are taken are unusable for application recoveries.
It is these tactical issues that the Simpana SnapProtect now addresses. Fully integrated into both the enterprise version of CommVault Simpana software as well as the customized Simpana software version on the PowerVault DL2100, IT managers no longer have to do their own scripting as they can use Simpana software to configure and schedule the occurrence of snapshots on the EqualLogic array.

The Simpana SnapProtect feature can also do snapshot management. It can discover previously created snapshots on the EqualLogic system and manage them as well as the snapshots that it created. IT managers can use the Simpana SnapProtect enabler to schedule the creation, retention and deletion of EqualLogic snapshots by simply setting policies within Simpana software so that they are retained and kept for the appropriate length of time.

Finally, IT managers using CommVault technology do not have to worry about the issue of applications snapshots taken in an inconsistent state. Simpana software integrates with applications like Exchange, Oracle and SQL Server and prior to taking a snapshot, Simpana software issues a command to the server to acquiesce the application so an application consistent snapshot can be taken.

This is all good news for IT managers. They can now better leverage the standard snapshot feature found on EqualLogic arrays and then manage the snapshots using the Simpana SnapProtect software.
 
The better news is that Simpana software can leverage the data in snapshots in ways simply not possible when only scripting is used. Simpana software can index the data in the snapshots so they can be accessed and searched during eDiscoveries or use designated snapshots as the source for backups to disk, tape or even to the cloud as well as a source for faster recoveries of individual files, folders or entire applications.

IT managers responsible for data center operations are still as tactical as ever in that they need products that solve today's problems. However there is no doubt that a shift in mindset is occurring in that while they want to solve current problems, they also want solutions that prevent these types of problems from recurring again in the future.
 
CommVault's support of the snapshot feature on Dell EqualLogic arrays typifies the type of solution that IT managers should be selecting. It solves their immediate tactical problem by providing them an easy way to introduce the use and management of snapshots into their backup and recovery scheme. But equally and maybe more importantly, CommVault is continuing down a singular path of meeting tomorrow's data management requirements without needing to bring in additional point products to do so. ]]> 'Rip and Replace' becomes more than Acceptable when Used in the Context of ROI tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2010://22.1262 2010-02-24T11:00:00Z 2010-02-24T11:00:00Z In a recent analyst conference call CommVault's VP of Marketing and Business Development, Dave West, pulled no punches about how CommVault wants enterprise organizations to view it in regards to backup modernization. While CommVault is certainly happy to assist those enterprise organizations that want to make incremental changes to their backup infrastructures, that is not who CommVault is specifically targeting. Rather CommVault is seeking out those customers and prospects that are ready to do a wholesale rip and replace of their existing data management products and go with a more modern solution. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html Dave West, pulled no punches about how CommVault wants enterprise organizations to view it in regards to backup modernization. While CommVault is certainly happy to assist those enterprise organizations that want to make incremental changes to their backup infrastructures, that is not who CommVault is specifically targeting.  Rather CommVault is seeking out those customers and prospects that are ready to do a wholesale rip and replace of their existing data management products and go with a more modern solution.

That's a pretty aggressive position to take in any market and especially so in the enterprise data storage and electronically stored information (ESI) space. Changes in how enterprise organizations manage their data and information usually are done over periods of years, not weeks or months, and phrases like "rip and replace" are almost never uttered. But new economic pressures and fundamental changes in how data and information is managed are making it apparent that more enterprise organizations are willing to make this type of dramatic shift in direction when the payback is right.

CommVault certainly seems to have no problem finding enterprise organizations that are willing to consider such changes, execute on them and then go on the record and talk about them. Last week's conference call had the IT Director from a large Midwestern retailer joining West to speak about his decision to make a wholesale change from Symantec to CommVault® Simpana® software.

Like many IT managers currently looking to improve their backup situation, he started from the premise in the spring of 2009 that he was going to make some incremental changes to his company's backup environment. Responsible for IT services in his company's main office as well as its over 200 remote store locations, making dramatic changes to this size environment on short notice is generally ill-advised. But a couple of factors forced him to alter his plans.

First, he was planning on upgrading all of his company's servers to Windows 2008 during the summer of 2009. Since he was using the native NTBackup utility found on previous versions of Windows at his remote sites, he assumed he would continue to do so after the upgrade to Windows 2008.  However as he began his preparations to roll out Windows 2008, he discovered that Microsoft has substantially changed its NTBackup utility.  He says, "Microsoft decimated how it used to work."

Second, since he was most familiar with Symantec, he just assumed that he would continue down that path. But problems that he had with Symantec's antivirus product led to concerns about an expanded use of Backup Exec. He feared that if he moved to a larger deployment of Backup Exec that he would run into issues similar to what he experienced with Symantec's anti-virus software.

This prompted him to step back and re-evaluate how to proceed but his problems were now three fold.

  • The clock was ticking. He had to get the roll-out of Windows 2008 done during the summer of 2009 but he only had 2-3 months to select a solution, develop an implementation plan and then roll it out.
  • His company used interns during the summer months to do roll outs in its stores. This meant the implementation had to be simple and not require a lot of expensive professional services.
  • He wanted to simplify backups. Despite his company's history of use with NTBackup in its remote store locations, he found the quality of the backups suspect plus it required a lot of manual scripting and scheduling to maintain.
But maybe most importantly he wanted to put in place a platform that would meet his company's needs now and into the future. Just because he was under these three constraints, he did not want to select a solution that did not meet his company's needs.  He says, "We decided to take a step back, take a broad look at everything and find the best solution for us."

He initially did some evaluations of other enterprise backup products such Symantec NetBackup, Symantec PureDisk and EMC Avamar. However they were not exactly what he needed so he did further research at which point he uncovered CommVault as CommVault kept popping up in many online forums. Then in subsequent conversations that he had with his peers, many had positive things to say about it.
 
So as he did more research on CommVault and its features, the more he found to like. This eventually led to his decision to deploy CommVault as part of his Windows 2008 rollout during the summer of 2009.

Despite his relatively new exposure to CommVault, his requirements and the short time in which he had to plan for its roll-out and implementation, the deployment of CommVault in all of his company's stores went off without a hitch. His company deployed CommVault on all of its servers during the summer with interns as it had done in the past and found it worked well right away.

Equally as important, he found that CommVault eliminated some of the other backup headaches he previously had.
 
  • CommVault provided his company with a single pane of glass so the five administrators at his company's headquarters could centrally administer backups at any remote site.
  • The need to manual scripting and scheduling was eliminated at the remote sites.
  • DBAs could do their own restores which they previously could not do.
Maybe most important, CommVault provided him with a platform that could grow with his company. CommVault's ability to add deduplication and server virtualization as plug-ins to the Simpana platform was a major factor in his decision to go with CommVault. While he did not deploy either of these options initially, CommVault enabled him to deploy a backup solution immediately while giving him the flexibility to plug in the deduplication and virtualization pieces when he was ready for them.

CommVault's West included in his closing remarks that the wholesale rip and replacement of existing data management products is a big job that is not taken lightly by most organizations (and rightly so!) But he stressed that CommVault's objective is to make that transition as easy as possible through the use of technology and the use of its service and support organizations.
 
Based upon the testimony of this IT Director and others like him that I have spoken to in the past, it appears that CommVault is succeeding in delivering on these objectives. CommVault is making the "unthinkable" task of rip and replace of data management software a palatable option to more enterprise organizations. Because of this, more organizations are seeing the fiscal, operational and technical benefits that come from using a more modern platform that is designed to meet today's and tomorrow's data management requirements. ]]> CommVault Takes another Step towards Bringing Cloud Storage Down to Earth tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2010://22.1245 2010-02-01T13:00:00Z 2010-02-01T13:00:00Z Just a few years ago disk-based backup was considered the cutting edge of backup. No more as cloud storage is now all the rage. However a cloud-based backup strategy that works or using cloud storage for archival data is still the exception, not the rule. This is why CommVault's announcement today regarding its new cloud storage connector merits attention for those organizations looking to make cloud storage a viable part of their corporate data management strategy. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html
Using a public cloud storage provider such as Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Nirvanix SDN, Iron Mountain's ASP or EMC Atmos as a disk-based archival or backup target sounds great on many levels to organizations. Organizations do not have to build their own disk-based backup infrastructure; they can scale out storage capacity as required; the headaches of managing and supporting the storage infrastructure belong to the third party cloud storage provider; and, they only pay for as much storage capacity as they consume.

If anything, cloud storage sounds like the perfect complement to a data management solution like CommVault® Simpana® software. Since Simpana software compresses, encrypts and optionally deduplicates data before it stores it, using cloud storage as an archival and backup target seems to be a logical next step.

However storing data to a public cloud storage solution has three specific obstacles that a solution like CommVault needs to be prepared to address:

  • Access the public storage cloud via the Internet. Most data management solutions only recognize and support NAS or VTL interfaces. Accessing a public storage cloud requires going though an HTTP interface.
  • Requires support for each public storage cloud provider's REST API. To traverse corporate firewalls and manage data stored in the storage cloud, the REST API has emerged as the preferred way to deliver this functionality since it runs as part of HTTP. However each public storage cloud provider implements its own version of the REST API since no standard exists.
  • Avoiding public cloud storage vendor lock-in. Storing data with a public storage cloud provider carries certain inherent risks. The amount of data stored with a provider may grow to the point where an organization wants to move the data from a public storage cloud to a lower priced competitor or even wants to move to a private storage cloud that they implement in-house. This requires the solution to support the REST API from multiple storage cloud providers in order to have this level of flexibility available.
This is what makes today's new cloud storage connector from CommVault of note. Using this new connector, CommVault Simpana users can detect and connect to public storage cloud offerings such as Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Nirvanix SDN as easily as any other disk-based backup targets.  And, customers will be able to take advantage of the cloud connector for cloud storage services from EMC and Iron Mountain at a future date.

Future support for REST APIs of other public and private cloud providers will hinge on how each provider has implemented it. If they are similar in nature to the ones it already supports, support for them could be added rather quickly while others that possess properties that significantly differ will take longer to add. In either case, CommVault's intentions to continue supporting more cloud storage providers - public or private - are important since it addresses consumers concerns about public storage cloud vendor lock-in and gives organizations the cloud storage flexibility they are certain to need in the future.

CommVault's approach to adding this new storage cloud connector to Simpana is also clearly inline with how it has brought previous features to market. It does not require complex upgrades or administrators to do extensive scripting to make it work. Rather CommVault customers with active maintenance contracts can download the latest CommVault service pack, license this feature and immediately use it to begin backing up data to any of the public cloud storage providers currently supported by CommVault.

Using cloud storage as a disk-based backup target is emerging as the next "Big" thing in data protection. But bringing cloud storage down to earth and making it easy for organizations to use as a backup target has remained somewhat elusive and difficult for end-users to implement. But my making it an optional add-on to the current Simpana product line, eliminating any requirements for scripting on the part of end-users and provide connectivity to multiple cloud storage providers, CommVault goes a long way towards moving cloud storage from hype to practical opportunity and perhaps pave the path for a new tier of "far line" storage as well. ]]> CommVault Tames the Mac; Windows and Mac Can Play Nice Together tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.1217 2009-12-21T16:00:00Z 2009-12-21T16:00:00Z A few years ago when I suggested to my co-workers that our company needed to account for the continuing growth of the Apple MacIntosh in its enterprise storage design, I was met with outright guffaws and left the meeting with my tail between my legs. Fast forward to today and the Mac is no longer a laughing matter. Mac is now an emerging OS in many enterprise organizations and creating new data management issues that today's announcement between CommVault and Group Logic should help address. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html announcement between CommVault and Group Logic should help address.

Everyone may smile at the cheeky "Mac versus Windows" commercials that regularly appear on network television but the Mac is showing up in the most unexpected of places. Some places where it is being adopted are quaint in nature, such as when my pastor who has three college-age children living at home sweeps his house of Windows PCs on the recommendation of his son and replaces them with Apple Mac Minis. But it is more notable such as when one of CommVault's clients did an internal audit on their ratio of Windows to Macs and found that 12% of their 12,500 desktops (1500 of them) are Macs.

This number of Macs changed the perspective of how this organization needed to manage them. While an obvious problem that it created was the need for the organization to provide Mac tech support for this OS, a more subtle back end problem that it created was managing the data on corporate networks that the Mac created and accessed.

Macs are traditionally used in the advertising, entertainment, media and publishing space so until now this served as a natural point of demarcation between it and Windows as almost every other vertical (government, finance, retail, etc.) used Windows. But now social media has taken off as at least 42% of enterprises now use Web 2.0 technologies which make extensive use of JPG, WAV and MP3 files. Further, those who are proficient in these editing and publishing these types of files are typically Mac aficionados and are bringing their Macs to work with them.

This is where the problems emerge. Media files are large and stored on network file servers where they consume a lot of space. Further, the value of the data in these files fluctuates so once the files satisfy their original purpose, they can become dormant and/or infrequently accessed. As such, they are prime candidates for archiving since organizations are rightfully loath to delete them as these file could become of value again in the future.

Now in Windows-only environments, it is rather straightforward to archive these files but once Macs enter the scene, the file archiving picture changes. An archived file leaves behind a stub on the file server that contains pertinent information such as where the file is now physically located and enable Windows clients to automatically retrieve the archived file from its new location. The key here is that the file is only retrieved if the Windows client selects it; the mere act of browsing the folders does not result in files being retrieved from the archive.

The Finder on Mac (Mac's equivalent of Windows explorer) does not behave the same way. As Finder browses folders with stubs in them, it triggers these stubs to request and retrieve the archived files associated with them. Depending on the size of the folder, this mere act can result in a Mac client 'hanging' for 3-5 minutes or more while files are retrieved from the archives.

This problem is only exacerbated on enterprise corporate networks. Not only is the Mac client accessing these files hung up, other Windows and Mac clients accessing this network file server experience degraded performance. Since the file server is busy processing this request to retrieve these archived files, it slows response times for all other clients accessing this file server.

This is why today's new partnership between CommVault and GroupLogic makes sense for a couple of reasons. First, GroupLogic's ArchiveConnect prevents exactly this type of behavior from happening. Using ArchiveConnect, Mac clients can browse network folders that contain these stubs without inadvertently triggering them to retrieve archived files. Second, enterprise companies that are already using or considering the use of CommVault Archive for their email and file archiving requirement can now do so without concern as to how it will impact them if they have Macs in their environment.

No one needs to worry about being laughed out of the room when bringing up the topic of how to best manage Macs anymore. The emergence of Macs within enterprises correlates with the growing importance that graphics and video are having but Macs create a new need for organizations to efficiently manage these files stored on network file servers without negatively impacting the organization as a whole. This new partnership between CommVault and GroupLogic should go a long ways towards making the Mac and Windows play nice together in the archiving space.
]]> CommVault Puts Database Archives on Enterprise Dashboards tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.1211 2009-12-14T17:15:00Z 2009-12-14T17:15:00Z Just how significant is today's announced technology partnership between CommVault and Informatica? Pretty big. The most obvious benefit that it provides to CommVault® Simpana® users is a new option that they can leverage to archive structured data while still managing and searching it using their Simpana software. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html announced technology partnership between CommVault and Informatica? Pretty big. The most obvious benefit that it provides to CommVault® Simpana® users is a new option that they can leverage to archive structured data while still managing and searching it using their Simpana software. But from an enterprise software management perspective, it continues to demonstrate CommVault's increased willingness to selectively partner with strategic software providers for technologies that are outside of its core competencies in order to display more data on enterprise dashboards.

The corporate adoption of software that archives unstructured and semi-structured data has accelerated in recent years while the archiving of structured data still remains on the fringes of corporate acceptance. It is not that the benefits of archiving structured data are not well known (improved application performance, optimized production storage space and reduced licensing costs), it is just that to date storing and managing the archives of structured data was as problematic as leaving them where they were.

Improvements in how database archiving software products manage archived data, growing structured data stores and new regulatory requirements are changing that and are, in the process, contributing to a heightened user interest in database archiving software.

On the database archiving side, one of its more significant improvements are software interfaces so that third party tools can access these database archives for search and retrieval. This is essentially what CommVault is leveraging in this partnership with Informatica. Informatica gives CommVault Simpana the ability to access data in its structured data archives through standard SQL/ODBC/JDBC interfaces as well as XAM and webDAV.

Leveraging these interfaces, CommVault can now directly access, search and report on archived data whether it comes from structured, unstructured or semi-structured archived data stores.

The timing for the announcement of this partnership between CommVault and Informatica is no accident. Analyst firms such as ESG and Gartner find that up to 50% of users that they have surveyed in 2009 are inquiring about archiving data in their structured data stores.
 
So why this surge in interest in 2009? While it is difficult to know exactly what is driving this sudden uptick in interest, a good bet is a directive issued by the European Union in 2006. At that time, it enacted the Directive on Mandatory Retention of Communications Traffic Data that requires ISPs and telecoms to retain of data such as emails and phone calls for up to two years.

While it was passed in March 2006, it only went into force this past March. Fast forward nine (9) months from March 2009 and large ISPs and telecoms that do business in Europe are probably now recognizing that complying with this directive is resulting in swelling structured data stores and are now actively looking at alternative means to store this data long term in a format that is accessible, economical, searchable and retrievable. While this is only one example, it certainly makes sense as to why now represents an opportune time for CommVault and Informatica to enter into a partnership to meet this burgeoning enterprise need.

However this partnership between CommVault and Informatica is also indicative of a maturing on CommVault's part as it continues to develop into an enterprise software provider. While its software has arguably been enterprise ready for a number of years, its reluctance in the past to partner with other software providers that offered technologies complementary to its own could surface as a concern to enterprise organizations. Many enterprises often only want to deal with a limited number of software providers. So while enterprise may like CommVault Simpana, if CommVault could not bring a larger portfolio of software solutions to the table, they would look elsewhere.

CommVault's recent partnerships with McAfee and now Informatica address these concerns head-on. More importantly, this partnership with Informatica displays a newfound willingness on CommVault's part to bring in software that is not native to CommVault in order to more effectively compete in enterprise accounts. In so doing, CommVault can provide those enterprise organizations that want it the single point of contact that they desire for all of their software requirements while still delivering on their pledge to make data easier to access, search, manage and retrieve.

CommVault's new partnership with Informatica and the addition of structured data archiving is what is grabbing the headlines today and rightfully so. It meets growing enterprise needs to archive their structured data stores while providing them  a single interface to access, search and retrieve any form of archived data.

However it is equally important that enterprise organizations do not miss the subtle but important change in mindset that CommVault continues to put on full display with this new partnership with Informatica. It shows it is serious about playing in enterprise accounts and willing to do what it takes in order to accomplish these objectives with its increased willingness to strike strategic agreements with other software companies that both offer superior software and complement CommVault's core competencies. This should serve as a winning combination for CommVault, its partners and the growing number of organizations that are selecting CommVault Simpana as their enterprise data management solution. ]]> Psychic Abilities No Longer a Prerequisite When Searching Corporate Data Repositories tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.1189 2009-11-16T11:00:00Z 2009-11-16T11:00:00Z Google. Yahoo! Bing. These are the search engines that people most often turn to research and find information on the Internet. But the problem with these search engines is that they make some assumptions that one cannot make when searching for data behind corporate fire walls. More specifically, when it comes to finding information within an organization, people do not even know what they need to search for so individuals almost need to be psychic when beginning their searches for this information. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html Google. Yahoo! Bing. These are the search engines that people most often turn to research and find information on the Internet. But the problem with these search engines is that they make some assumptions that one cannot make when searching for data behind corporate fire walls. More specifically, when it comes to finding information within an organization, people do not even know what they need to search for so individuals almost need to be psychic when beginning their searches for this information.

It is pretty well known that major search engines find information that organizations make publicly available on the Internet outside of the corporate firewall. It is also becoming better known that organizations can obtain search engine solutions that assist them in finding information that resides behind corporate fire walls. 

This secondary set of search engines is being deployed more often within organizations to assist them in their searches of data residing on corporate file servers, in archived data stores and Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint repositories and to help them comply with eDiscovery requests as well as make for more efficient business operations.

However not all searches occur in the same fashion. General purpose search engines - whether searching on the public Internet or behind corporate firewalls - make a general assumption in performing the search: it assumes the user wants to search all of the data to which the user has permission to access.

In the use case of a search done on the public Internet, the search engine has access to anything published on the web and the search results reflect that. In a similar fashion, the use case of a search done against information behind the firewall, the search results are limited to what the user has the security permissions to access and view. But in both cases, the search engine makes the assumption that the user wants to search and see results for all data to which the user and search engine can access.

But this assumption fails to account for situations where the user does not want to search all data repositories but only a specific data repository or type of data. The scenario where this most often occurs is when the individual knows what specific information that they are looking for and which data repository that the information resides.

In this situation, using a general purpose search engine can actually become detrimental. First, it returns much more information than the individual needs so it takes longer to sort through the search results to find the information desired. Second, when performed in the context of an eDiscovery, it may turn up information that is outside of the scope of the search boundaries agreed upon during the "meet and confer" between the plaintiff's and defendant's attorneys as part of FRCP 2006 rules.

A practical example of which search method a user will employ is reflected in how an individual performs her search and what motivates her to start her search where she does. If she knows exactly what she is looking for and knows that the data resides in Microsoft Exchange and/or Microsoft Outlook, the scope of search is simple and she will go to the search tool provided by that application to begin her search.

Conversely, if she only has a general idea of what she is looking for but no real sense of where exactly in the organization the information resides, she will resort to using a more generalized search engine that can access and search a larger number of corporate data repositories.

In discussing these two different approaches to search with Simon Taylor, CommVault's Senior Director of Information Access and Management, he brought out that CommVault® Simpana® is evolving to accommodate these two behavior patterns that users exhibit when searching within a single information search portal.

CommVault Simpana has for some time provided a search interface that fell into the latter category. It was intended for users who had little or no idea where the data resided and needed to find it regardless of its location.

However CommVault has spent the last few years understanding how users search for data to provide more structured options within its search interface to allow users to select parameters so they only search specified data stores, mine information by classification or suggestion, and focus on specific types of information derived from applications such at Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft Outlook.

The key way that Simpana differentiates itself is to provide users with a single interface to search for any data regardless of where it resides while also giving them the option to limit their searches to specific data repositories, types and classifications of information and target data when they know where it resides.

Searching for data on the Internet outside of corporate fire wall is a task so simple that even a child can do searches. However searching for information behind corporate firewalls is becoming a far more specialized task that involves accessing multiple data stores as well as verifying a user's permissions to access and view the data.

Search is only now starting to take into account a user's knowledge (or lack thereof) as to where the data resides in the enterprise. It is for these reasons that companies like CommVault are continuing to enhance search options within its software to account for these more sophisticated search behaviors of end users without the prerequisite of psychic abilities to find this data while giving them access to a single interface they can use to perform these searches. ]]> Manual Classification of Data is Still a Best Practice when Developing a Repeatable and Defensible Process tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.1147 2009-09-30T10:00:00Z 2009-09-30T10:00:00Z Smart managers always put a large emphasis on automating whatever processes they can within their organizations and for good reasons: processes become more predictable, there is a reduced chance of human error and ultimately the business is more successful. However businesses are finding out that it may not be in their best interest to automate data classification and that for now courts still prefer people to computers when it comes to performing this particular task. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html
My interest in this topic was piqued by a recent conversation I had with Shannon Smith, an attorney who is an eDiscovery and Archiving Specialist with CommVault. We were discussing the pros and cons of the retention policy that many businesses inadvertently adopt (that is to say, they keep all of the data that they create). The reason they take this strategy is simple: it is easy to implement (many of them do this by default anyway) and it saves them the hassle of trying to classify records according to the various internal and external policies that exist.

She explained that in some verticals this model makes sense and is probably even desirable, such as among architectural and engineering firms, video production houses and other lines of business where the data that they store does not contain sensitive personal information. But when you start to talk about financial services firms, health care providers or bio-med and pharmaceutical companies, these organizations need to develop retention policies that make sense both for their business and that satisfies federal regulations.

The trick in these circumstances is to first properly classify the data so the appropriate retention policy or policies can be applied to it.  My initial reaction when she said this was that organizations should look to identify a software tool that could automate the classification and retention of this data.

Shannon disagreed. She said that even though CommVault® Simpana® does have a tool built into it called "Content Director" that can automatically classify data, the advice that CommVault generally gives to its clients is that they classify their data by dragging and dropping data into folders that have specific archiving and retention policies associated with them.
 
This confused me as I assumed it would be the other way around. To me it made more sense to use a software tool to do the data classification as opposed to turning over a task as subjective as data classification over to an end-user or group of end-users.

However it is precisely because classifying data is so subjective that it is for now still best left in the hands of users albeit intelligent end-users. In addition, most organizations do not have the proper processes in place to leverage automated classification with confidence - e.g., published guidelines for how and where to save data, consistent file naming schemas, etc.

Smith explained that the key here is "intelligent users" since they can understand the context of how data is kept. Organizations probably do not want to save employee emails regarding their lunch plans though they may want to keep those emails where the lunch plans reference discussions about negotiating the terms of a contract. This requires a certain amount of intelligence on the part of the user to properly classify the data.

To use a tool that automates the classification and retention of a specific email solely based upon a single word such as "lunch" or "contract" would be inappropriate since the context of how these words are used is critical. She says, "The idea is to move away from retaining data based upon file types to retaining data based upon the actual content. However for now most customers agree that using people to classify data and make that determination is still the best way to properly classify data.  We won't likely see a change in this area until organizations recognize the value in developing and enforcing data retention guidelines that make automation much more reliable."

However in order for a business to successfully use people to classify their data and have that process hold up in court means businesses must train their users. She adds, "If a business has never trained its users on how to manage their data, it is unlikely that the organization can claim with any confidence that it has developed a repeatable and defensible process around data management and ediscovery efforts."

Smith recommends that businesses first develop data retention policies and then instruct their employees on how to classify data. This way, when the organization gets hit with a subpoena or lawsuit, there will be some semblance of order during the collections process.  Businesses do not have to make the process perfect day one as they can, over time, make improvements to the process. However courts will look for these processes as it gives them more confidence that the business is following a process as opposed to flying by the seat of its pants every time it gets hit with a lawsuit and has to perform an eDiscovery.

In this respect, CommVault Simpana supports full content indexing so users can classify the data regardless of where it resides. The metadata and contents can then be searched against regardless of where the data resides in the business, be it in the form of archives, backups or even online data that is still sitting on production servers. This capability becomes very valuable as it can be used by any business user to search across all corporate data (SharePoint data, online or offline email, file servers, etc.)

Today's world is all about process and automation but data classification does not yet appear to be a process that can be readily automated in such a way that organizations can rely on the outputs. The ability to leverage automation requires organizations to develop and enforce detailed classification and retention procedures and most companies have not yet dedicated the resources to such an effort.

While progress is being made in data classification and companies like CommVault envision and are working towards the goal of delivering tools that enable automated and reliable processes, for now businesses must still rely on documented procedures, educated users and sophisticated search engines such as what CommVault provides to deliver on the repeatable and defensible processes that courts are looking for now.
]]> As Organizations Bring on Cloud Storage CommVault Brings on the Data Management tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.1127 2009-09-10T10:00:00Z 2009-09-10T10:00:00Z More enterprise organizations are examining the possibilities of storing their data to a "cloud" and archive and backup data are heading the list of the two forms of data that they are most likely to store in the cloud. But managing these two types of data once they are in the cloud is anything but a straightforward process. Different archiving and backup software solutions create their own data silos with their own data management and retention policies. This situation can create new eDiscovery and legal hold challenges that organizations are ill-prepared to deal with. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html
This problem of managing these data stores created by different, individual archiving and backup solutions already exists in most organizations. It is not uncommon for different departments and business units within an enterprise organization to have their own archive and/or backup products that are not centrally managed. It is only as organizations initiate storage consolidation efforts and move to a common storage platform such as cloud storage that they begin to grasp the scope of the data management problems and their associated costs.

Shannon Smith, an attorney and eDiscovery and Archiving Specialist with CommVault, finds that a specific problem that an organization faces when using different archiving and backup products is the consistent expiration of data across this environment. When an organization goes into court and says, "Look, opposing counsel, you can only ask for email that is three years old because that is all we keep. Our policy is to archive data that is 60 days old and keep it for three years and that is all that we have."

However when an organization has an environment where the data repositories associated with its backup and archive products are separate, they may or may not know that their data exists somewhere else in the organization, such as on the backup side. So if data does show up that is over three years old, it has essentially blown the organizational retention schedule out of the water. Smith says, "At that point opposing counsel can essentially ask for anything it wants because you have shown that, although the organization has a policy, it isn't actually being adhered to."

Organizations can not act or assume that the current challenges associated with managing disparate archive and backup data stores will disappear once it is stored in the cloud. While there is some speculation that this may occur as cloud storage offerings advance in basic storage intelligence, for now organizations need to continue to assume that it is still their responsibility to perform this data management task. So as they look to move these different data stores to the cloud, it is important they put in place a solution that can manage and then consistently expire this data across both their backup and archive data sets.

CommVault has leveraged the cloud in the sense it has made it an extension of its customer's internal storage environment. CommVault has extended what organizations think of as traditional tiers (disk and tape) to include the cloud. Because of the integration that CommVault® Simpana® has, it makes it much easier to do that.

The benefit to organizations that CommVault provides is that it can start to apply retention and life cycle management to these assets or records. That data can then be aged off naturally as opposed to just moving data into the cloud without some sort of tool to manage it. In that situation, organizations are not really clear what data it has in the cloud plus they have no strategy to manage it.

Cloud storage may someday provide "data aware" or "smart" clouds that do not require organizations to use agents to collect, retain and search against your information assets stored in the cloud but that day is not today. What separates CommVault from the competition is that its solution is integrated so that organizations can remove both their storage silos and their data silos as they move data into the cloud. In this way they are managing one single pool of data versus separate archive and backup sets which only improves an organization's ability to find its assets but it also improves the overall management of its data in general. ]]> Cloud Storage only Provides for Bigger Storage Buckets not Better Data Management Solutions tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.1118 2009-09-03T18:00:00Z 2009-09-03T18:00:00Z To say that storage clouds are gathering in the distance is probably an understatement. Everyone is beginning to see the benefits - both technical and financial - that cloud storage provides, especially in the archiving and backup realms. But there are more factors to consider than just the underlying architecture of the provider's cloud storage offering or the price per GB. Managing and accessing data in the cloud presents entirely new risks that organizations either are still failing to address or may not even know exist. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html
Archiving and backup data are the two primary forms of data that organizations are first looking to move to the cloud since it gives them a cost-effective near-line storage solution for this data. Recent advances in storage technology now deliver highly available, high capacity, offsite storage systems via the Internet with costs that start as low as three (3) cents per GB per month from some cloud storage providers. At those rates, it only makes sense for organizations to contemplate moving more of this type of data to the cloud.

But as the costs of storing data in the cloud continue to decrease, the costs and unknowns associated with managing and accessing it only increase, especially as it relates to eDiscovery and compliance. Shannon Smith, an eDiscovery and Archiving Specialist with CommVault, finds that the same problems that organizations have now around doing eDiscovery and putting in place legal holds do not magically disappear as they move data into the cloud and actually may get worse unless they have a strategy to manage that data.

Individuals within organizations already are struggling with eDiscovery and compliance issues and the data is within their own data center where they have control over it. For instance, individuals on the IT side ask:

  • Do we have the data?
  • Can we find the data?
  • Has it been archived or replicated or backed up?
  • Can we find it quickly?
Conversely, individuals on the legal teams are constantly asking:

  • Is the data authentic?
  • Has the metadata been preserved?
  • Is it the original version of the item that is being requested?
  • Can we show chain of custody?
Cloud storage does not answer any of these questions. All it does is provide organizations with yet another storage bucket to store their data. Granted, it is a much bigger storage bucket but it is a storage bucket nonetheless. So if all an organization does is dump its data into this new, big cloud storage bucket, the only result may be is an amplification of an organization's underlying eDiscovery and compliance problems. 

Smith finds that there are two primary issues associated with storing data in the cloud in regards to eDiscovery and compliance.

  • Finding the data in a timely manner. This activity may actually be inhibited by moving data to the cloud. Organization have to pay upload and download charges when storing data in the cloud so while they can often forecast upload charges since they know roughly how much data they are archiving or backing up on a daily or weekly basis, doing an eDiscovery may require downloading the data from the cloud back to an organization's site so it can be searched and indexed.
She says, "It is not just about finding the data but finding it in a timely manner. Using a streamlined or automated process is always better than using a manual process. However the manual process is what CommVault sees as the rule rather than the exception."
  • Botched eDiscovery attempts. Few organizations like to think about the costs or implications of an eDiscovery gone awry but it happens more often than anyone likes to think about. Here are just a few of the problems that resulted in a recently botched eDiscovery exercise that resulted in a lawsuit between a law firm and its eDiscovery service provider:
  • Electronically stored information (ESI) took too long to load which reduced the time available to review the material relevant to the case
  • Unscheduled server outages prevented teams from accessing needed documents
  • Creation of production sets for review were incorrectly marked
Moving data to the cloud only increases the potential for such incidents to occur. Now in addition to these sorts of issues, organizations need to account for the availability of their data stored in the cloud as well as the viability and stability of the cloud storage provider itself. Already a number of storage cloud providers have gone out of business and the data that organizations had stored with them has also disappeared or become inaccessible.
So what is an organization to do? Cloud storage is coming whether the IT and legal teams within organizations like it or not simply because the business benefits of cloud storage are so compelling. To that Smith provides a simple answer, "Adopt technology that will automate some of your processes and develop internal processes and procedures to help support these types of workflows so organizations can target these areas of risk."

In that vein, software like CommVault® Simpana® has already differentiated itself from other providers by making the cloud an extension of an organization's internal storage environment. So while CommVault can both migrate data to and from the cloud, it also mitigates some of the other risks associated with cloud storage. It can content index all data stored to the cloud so organizations can search this data without having to retrieve it. Further, because CommVault can manage both disk and tape, organizations can configure CommVault to keep a copy of data both in the cloud and on tape just in case the cloud provider itself should ever go away.

Moving data to the storage cloud is no panacea. The upside is that cloud storage can eliminate upfront capital storage costs and reduce ongoing operational costs associated with the management of the physical storage hardware and software while creating a bigger storage bucket to keep all of this data. However it cannot do eliminate or even mitigate the costs associated with data management. That is a responsibility that organizations still have to shoulder for themselves and for which software like CommVault Simpana was designed to provide. ]]> Finally! A Vendor That Comes to You Instead of You Having to Go to Them tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.1095 2009-08-05T10:00:00Z 2009-08-05T10:00:00Z Maybe it has always been this way, but when a vendor hosts a customer event, it always seems that you (Mr. Customer) must pay to go and to learn about their (Mr. Vendor's) product. To me, this has always seemed somewhat backwards. You (Mr. Customer) pay a whole bunch of money for their product in the first place, then another 15 - 20% annually for support, then more for training and then, to add insult to injury, they make you pay for airfare, hotel and a registration fee to attend their annual customer event. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html pay to go and to learn about their (Mr. Vendor's) product. To me, this has always seemed somewhat backwards. You (Mr. Customer) pay a whole bunch of money for their product in the first place, then another 15 - 20% annually for support, then more for training and then, to add insult to injury, they make you pay for airfare, hotel and a registration fee to attend their annual customer event. So when I heard that CommVault was going on the road to meet its current and potential customers and partners to explain to them the value of Simpana instead of making you come to them, I thought, "Well, it's about time."

Now I don't want to be overly critical about centralized customer events but let's be frank. Many of these are just subtle cover-ups for vendor love fests that double as paid corporate vacations for both the customers attending the event and the vendors hosting the event. Sure, customers get some information and a chance to network with other end-users but one has to sometimes wonder just how much learning actually occurs when the events are held in sites like Las Vegas, New York, Orlando and San Francisco. Maybe we can all do that when the economy is humming along but right now the economy is doing anything but humming along.

So when CommVault told me it was going on the road, two things struck me. Either (A) no one wanted to come to its Oceanport, NJ, headquarters for a 2-day customer event; or (B) CommVault recognized that customers have no travel/training (aka vacation) budgets this year. Personally, I think it is  the latter so to get the word out about CommVault® Simpana®, CommVault is taking its Simpana show (called Innovate8) on the road with stops at eleven North American cities currently planned as listed below.

August 6: Washington, DC
September 9: Chicago, IL
September 17: New York, NY
September 23: Boston, MA
September 30: Seattle, WA
October 7: San Francisco, CA
October 14: Los Angeles, CA
October 21: Houston, TX
Nov 4: Toronto, ONT (Canada)

In looking at CommVault's planned agenda for Innovate8, those individuals in the Washington DC area who plan to attend need to get on the stick immediately as the first show is this Thursday, August 6th. Everyone else has a little more time to plan ahead as the next event is scheduled in early September in Chicago. After that, CommVault will host an event in a different city nearly every week for the next ten weeks until early November.

If you do not see your city or a city near you on the list but want to attend, don't despair. Just let CommVault know. It is taking a page out of your favorite rock band's website and asking users to suggest additional cities where CommVault should consider hosting the event. While this sounds interesting and I hope CommVault can pull it off, the devil is always in the details. But I definitely got the sense in speaking to Mike Marchi, a VP with CommVault, that if there was sufficient interest in a particular city, CommVault would work to make it happen.

Overall, in looking at the event agenda, it looks like it should be informative. CommVault is not relying exclusively upon the fire power of its own internal experts to draw in users as it is tapping Randy Kahn of Kahn Consulting, Inc. for the keynote presentation. While I have not had the privilege of meeting Randy or hearing him speak, he is well-versed on the topics of litigation and email archiving which are topics to which everyone can relate. Once he is done, CommVault will offer a couple of different learning tracks on backup redesign and modernization as well as eDiscovery and compliance.

So who should attend? Well, if you can are a current CommVault user (7.x or earlier), you should definitely look into it. Simpana 8 brings a lot to the table (deduplication, improved support for server virtualization) which makes upgrading to Simpana 8 almost a no-brainer once you understand all of its benefits.

Those who are dissatisfied with their current backup software should also consider attending. CommVault is now at 10,000+ customers and adding 200-300 new customers every quarter. Obviously it is doing something right in the enterprise backup space and it behooves you to find out what is so special about Simpana. Since it is coming to your front door in a number of cities and giving you the chance to learn about it, you might as well check it out and get a free lunch to boot.

Editor's Note: This blog was updated on August 21, 2009, to reflect changes to the Innovate 8 customer tour list.
]]> CommVault® Simpana® is in Right Place at the Right Time as more Users Want 'Two-Fers' for their IT Dollars tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.1087 2009-07-28T10:00:00Z 2009-07-28T10:00:00Z In the last few weeks I have had conversations with users and consultants in the US and Europe regarding the new role that data deduplication will play in enterprise data centers. Needless to say, everyone is talking about it, many are starting to implement it and data deduplication's role as a permanent fixture in reducing backup data stores is all but assured. But what is more interesting is that these individuals are starting to look beyond just using data deduplication as a means to solve their backup problems. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html deduplication as a means to solve their backup problems. Rather they now view it as the first step in bringing their broader data and information management problems under control.

Two managers of enterprise environments that I recently spoke with have already deployed data deduplication into their backup infrastructures. In these environments, they are using disk as a backup target, have seen their backup success ratios improve to near 100% and are seeing significant reductions in their data stores - roughly on the order of 20:1. These results are pretty typical and no longer very noteworthy.

More interesting is that these two individuals are now starting to focus on better managing the data that resides on their production storage. The freedom from troubleshooting failed backups and managing tape recoveries is allowing them to look at their environment more holistically. As they do so, they are seeing that a sizeable percentage of their data either no longer belongs on production disk or could be backed up more effectively using alternative methods.

This comes as no surprise to these individuals. Academically, they knew they had data on their production storage system that would benefit from archive or an alternative method of backup that did not require them to send all of the data across their networks. But because they were always scrambling to fix their nightly backup problems and did not have the empirical data to prove that this was the case, the situation persisted until they just recently fixed it.

To their credit, they moved their organizations forward and solved their day-to-day tactical backup problems but the issue of better managing their production data stores now looms. In previous blog entries DCIG has advised users to look beyond just solving today's tactical backup problems when they implement disk-based backup and data deduplication. Instead as they look to solve their backup problems, they should also look to put in place a permanent data management solution that can solve both their immediate backup problems and serve as a foundation that can resolve their equally pressing issues surrounding continuing data growth.

That's a message that sometime receives a lukewarm response from end-users but these are not normal economic times. The feedback I am receiving is that users are starting to spend money again (albeit slowly and which is confirmed by other technology providers) and as they do so, they are taking more time in making their decisions and want "two-fers" - that is, that want to solve two problems for the price of one when they make a capital expenditure.

That probably explains why on the six month anniversary of CommVault® Simpana® 8.0's release that it continues to gather momentum among both existing and new companies. Its inclusion of data deduplication that spans from disk to tape coupled with its improved protection of server virtualization operating systems like Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX server solve the immediate backup and recovery issues that are confronting organizations now.

However archiving and reporting that are also part of the Simpana platform are key for users willing to look beyond today's immediate backup problems and put in place a foundation that will enable them to solve tomorrow's looming data management problems as well. Without these tools, their backup problems are prone to reappear sooner or later since they have not directly addressed their issues around data growth. Using these other features of Simpana, they can track and report on data growth and then archive data when appropriate to help prevent backup from becoming a problem again and keep data growth under control.

The introduction of data deduplication into disk-based backup has made solving today's backup problems much easier as numerous users testify. But solving tomorrow's data management problems today is not that much more difficult to accomplish with products such as Simpana. It delivers the "two-fer" that organizations want today as they start to resume spending by solving both today's backup problems and tomorrow's looming data management issues.

So while I congratulate CommVault on its success in data deduplication and its improved support for virtualization OSes in Simpana 8.0, CommVault is to be lauded for delivering a product that appears to be in the right place at the right time for the economic climate in which many end-users find themselves. ]]> Explosive Data Growth Prompts Change in Herbalife's Backup Strategy tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.1082 2009-07-22T10:00:00Z 2009-07-22T10:00:00Z ""We are experiencing explosive rates of data growth." That statement is made every day by many organizations in many places. But when it is your organization experiencing the explosive data growth rates and you are the one responsible for managing and protecting it, it takes on a whole new level of meaning. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html
That was the situation Herbalife's Principal IT Engineer, Andy Hansen, found Herbalife in as the amount of data that Herbalife was managing had exploded from 32 TBs to 240 TBs in a little over a year's time. Hansen's task? Explain and justify to his management why Herbalife needed to replace its existing backup software with new data management and protection software that would meet its needs now and into the future.

In a previous blog entry, Hansen explained why Herbalife's current backup software was failing to meet its data protection requirements even before its current explosion in data growth occurred and exacerbated the situation. Then in a subsequent blog entry, Hansen talked about how he narrowed the field down from three competing enterprise data protection products to just one: CommVault® Simpana®. Now he had to help his management also understand why Herbalife's existing backup software no longer met its needs as well as why they needed to make an investment in CommVault.

To do so, Hansen used a two-fold approach. He first laid out to them all of the areas in which Herbalife's existing backup software was leaving it exposed: failed backup jobs, inadequate reporting capabilities and its general inability to protect and recover data locally and remotely. But in order to convince his management to bring in a new data management and protection software and proceed with CommVault Simpana, he made a simple but poignant statement to them, "We have not invested properly for the amount of data that we need to protect."

That statement got their attention. In much the same way his management had previously recognized that they needed to invest in ERP software to match new business demands, that statement helped them to understand that they needed to make a similar investment in their data protection software to match the explosive rate of data growth that had resulted from the deployment of the ERP software.  And once the investment was made and CommVault was purchased and deployed, Herbalife recognized numerous tangible and intangible benefits including:

  • Push agent technology. CommVault Simpana eliminated the need for backup administrators to manually access each server and install backup agents as Simpana could manually push agents out to each server, even in remote sites. Simpana became the rallying cry around which he used to drive a corporate initiative to deploy Active Directory everywhere and simplify the management of their corporate network as well as their deployment of CommVault Simpana.
  • Backup success rates climbed to over 99%. Using disk was part of the Hansen's plan to redesign his backup infrastructure anyway but when it was used in conjunction with CommVault Simpana, he saw his backup success rates climb to over 99%. In the process, he reduced his backup windows while increasing the amount of data he was able to protect. Further, prior to using CommVault Simpana in conjunction with disk, he never considered backing up his test and development environments as there was no way he could meet his backup windows backing up this data. Now using CommVault and disk, he could complete the backup of all of data - production, test and development - in less time.
  • Backup is no longer a full-time position. About a year prior to switching to CommVault, Herbalife had hired a full-time backup administrator to perform backup tasks such as tape management and troubleshooting backup problems. But once CommVault was deployed, that position become almost obsolete as Hansen now thought the administrator was spending at most an hour or two a day troubleshooting backups and that was only on the rare occasions when there was problems. The rest of the time, all the backup administrator does now is check the morning reports for any errors. This freed up the backup administrator to do regular cleanup and maintenance on Herbalife's Active Directory implementation.
  • Successful Oracle database backups and restores. The introduction of the ERP software had resulted in the creation of huge Oracle databases in Herbalife's environment that were over 5 TBs in size. Using CommVault, Hansen could now backup or restore these Oracle databases in about 11 hours. Further, when he did test restores, the only comment he ever got back from his Oracle DBAs was, "We're good, thanks."
  • No extra backup reporting software was necessary. Many times when organizations select backup software, they often need to purchase third party backup reporting software to help them manage the backups. In the case of CommVault, Hansen did not find that a necessary at all as it included all of the canned reports that he needed, allowed him to set alerts for every system and gave him the ability to holistically view his backup environment.
But maybe the most telling statement about the benefits that CommVault Simpana provided was Hansen's response to the two questions I asked him before we parted. I asked him, "Did he feel exposed before he implemented CommVault?" and, "Did he still felt exposed now?" Hansen replied, "Absolutely I felt exposed. I never had any confidence that I could recover my data. But now I rarely if ever feel that way and when I do, it is because someone forgot to communicate to me that they put a new server into production." If that is not an argument for investing properly in a data protection solution and making a change in backup strategy, I don't know what is. ]]> CommVault Simpana Delivers the "Wow" During Herbalife's Backup Software Evaluation tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.1076 2009-07-15T10:00:00Z 2009-07-15T10:00:00Z The "Wow" factor. Everyone innately knows that's what separates the great from the good in any industry no matter what product or service it is that they are evaluating. Of course, no one ever really knows exactly when it is the "Wow" moment will occur and it was no different for Herbalife's Principal IT Engineer, Andy Hansen, when he was evaluating enterprise backup software products from CommVault, EMC and Symantec. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html CommVault, EMC and Symantec. But like when most "Wow" moments occur, it was not a scenario that he had planned for ahead of time as it occurred rather unexpectedly while he was evaluating these different backup software products.

In a previous blog entry, I examined the combination of problems that Herbalife was experiencing with its current backup software and its data growth necessitated that it upgrade to enterprise backup software to minimize its current level of exposure. But bringing in three different enterprise backup software products in-house and then performing a thorough evaluation of each of them is no trivial task. It is both difficult to execute upon and has long term ramifications for his company. So to cope with this, he adopted a two-step process to make the appropriate decision.
 
His first step in the evaluation process was to prepare a detailed check list that compared the technical features of each backup software product in terms of what he needed for his environment. Overall he found that CommVault® Simpana® and Symantec NetBackup compared favorably from a technical perspective but he quickly ruled out EMC Networker. One of Herbalife's sites was already using EMC Networker and he knew from past experience that it broke frequently in his environment. So at that point Hansen proceeded to his second phase of testing: in-house testing of the remaining two products.

Hansen found that both CommVault Simpana and Symantec NetBackup installed relatively easily in his environment but there were two specific areas where he consistently gave CommVault higher marks than Symantec NetBackup.

  • Service and support. Throughout the entire testing period, he found that CommVault consistently provided high levels of service and support for his team as Herbalife tested it in conjunction with its different operating systems, applications and at its remote sites.
  • Level of integration between products. Due to CommVault's singular design, he also found it extremely beneficial that while he was installing CommVault's backup software for testing that he could also install and test its archiving software. Both the archiving and backup software were managed through the same management interface which made it easy for Herbalife to see exactly what was going on as well as set policies that applied to both the archiving and backup software.
However what really set CommVault Simpana apart in Hansen's mind was how it enabled Herbalife to recover from an error committed by an administrator during the testing period. An Herbalife administrator had received a work request to delete five (5) users from an Active Directory group but misread the work request and instead deleted five (5) entire Active Directory groups. Normally such an action would have had disastrous consequences since almost immediately after the AD groups were deleted one of Herbalife's users called and reported something was wrong.

This was when the "Wow" moment occurred. Since the deletion of the AD groups had just occurred, Herbalife's IT staff knew almost immediately what the source of the problem was. However fixing it was normally no easy proposition and it could take hours to complete with a substantial disruption to user processes in the meantime.

However because of CommVault Simpana's deep integration with Microsoft Windows AD, it included a restore option that enabled Herbalife to restore the deleted AD groups in about two minutes. This not only prevented an unnecessary disruption to Herbalife's production processes but was the "Wow" moment that Hansen had been looking for and cemented in his mind why he should select CommVault Simpana as Herbalife's enterprise backup software.

However now that he had made up mind and reached his technical conclusion, the task that still remained in front of him was to cost-justify his decision and convince his management on how to proceed. I'll cover the arguments he used to support his rationale to proceed with the purchase of CommVault Simpana in a forthcoming blog entry.

Part 1 in this 3-part series took a look at what issues Herbalife was experiencing with its existing backup software that prompted it to look for a new solution.
]]> Deduplication can be a Quick Backup Fix but Permanent Data Management Solutions Exist tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.1061 2009-06-30T10:00:00Z 2009-06-30T10:00:00Z Most organizations simply do not like to think about their backup problems. To many their backup problems feel so overwhelming and the steps to fix them are so painful and complicated that they are desperately looking for a quick fix. So when a technology like deduplication comes along that appears to do exactly that, their initial reaction is to buy it. But organizations should not fail to consider other products that include deduplication technology as part of their solution. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html steps to fix them are so painful and complicated that they are desperately looking for a quick fix. So when a technology like deduplication comes along that appears to do exactly that, their initial reaction is to buy it. But organizations should not fail to consider other products that include deduplication technology as part of their solution. These solutions can provide the quick backup fix that organizations crave while addressing persistent, underlying data management issues that also need attention.

Deduplication is one of the more revolutionary technologies to emerge in the data protection space in quite some time with interest in the technology and its potential currently reaching a fever pitch. The interest in deduplication is most likely driven by two factors that are currently on the minds of many:

  • The pending acquisition of Data Domain by either EMC or NetApp. Data Domain's acquisition price of nearly $2 billion dollars raised eyebrows from Main Street to Wall Street. Not only did it re-ignite the conversation around whether deduplication is a feature or a technology, but it raises the specter of what potential that deduplication may hold for other applications besides backup.
  • Staffing cutbacks coupled with continuing data growth rates. Job loss estimates for 2008 and 2009 vary but an estimated 3 million jobs were lost in 2008 and more than 2 million jobs have already been lost in 2009. In spite of fewer people working, many attendees at a recent TechTarget Backup School event in Waltham, MA, cited data growth as their number one challenge. Fewer staff and more data are forcing organizations to identify better, more effective ways to protect their data and attendees saw deduplication as one way to accomplish this goal.
But here is the trap that organizations must be careful not to fall into when looking to deploy deduplication when it is part of a target-based deduplication appliance. The primary promises that target-based deduplication appliance providers confidently make regarding deduplication are reducing backup times, improving backup success rates and reducing data stores.

However they will rarely if ever make any promises about improving the manageability of your data stores. In fact, when I pressed one provider on the topic, the provider absolved itself of responsibility in this matter and say it is not their problem nor was it their intent to solve this issue.

This is where organizations need to recognize deduplicating target-based appliances for what they really are. They provide a 3, 6 or even a 12 month respite from an organization's current backup problems by suppressing the symptoms of out-of-control data growth. However they do little or nothing to stem an organization's underlying problems around continual data growth, managing data retention and searches of archived, backup or production data.
 
While in good times organizations may be able to sweep this issue under the rug, a recent blog by CommVault's David West makes the point that a perfect storm is descending upon organizations. Inefficient IT processes, immature backup software, shrinking budgets, flat or declining head counts and growing legal requirements to discover and produce data is forcing organizations to spend their money more prudently
.
As they do so, they need to think more strategically about what solutions they buy. They can no longer expect to just throw money at a problem in the hopes that it will magically go away and, if it does not, then receive more money next quarter or next year to try to deal with the issue then. Those days are coming to an end if not already over.

Instead organizations should take a step back and see what other problems they can solve beyond just deduplicating their backup data. Archiving email and file data, performing eDiscoveries and reporting on data growth and backups are other issues that persist in many organizations. While these features do not have the same glamour that deduplication currently possesses, by bringing them in-house organizations can begin address the real issues that are causing the backup problems in the first place.

Data management software such as CommVault® Simpana® supports all of these features - archiving, deduplication, replication, reporting, search and many more. Further, in the last few years CommVault has taken great strides to tailor Simpana to meet the requirements of any size organization. CommVault can deliver a solution that meets an organization's immediate deduplication needs while putting in place a platform that can meet their future data management needs.

The hype around deduplication has not been all bad as it has served to provide greater attention on the issue of backup with which many organizations struggle. But organizations that view deduplication as some type of silver bullet for their backup problems are setting themselves up for disappointment down the road. There are no silver bullets to solving long term backup problems but data management software like CommVault Simpana does a remarkable job of providing a short term fix while delivering a platform as a long term solution that fits the needs of most any size organization. ]]> Herbalife's Organic Data Growth Creates Unexpected Backup Challenges tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.1055 2009-06-25T10:00:00Z 2009-06-25T10:00:00Z Exposed. That was the position that Herbalife's Principal IT Engineer, Andy Hansen, found himself in more frequently in mid-2007 as he watched Herbalife's data growth explode and the backup software that he was using struggle to keep up. Much of Herbalife's new data growth was driven by its new corporate-wide enterprise resource planning (ERP) software initiative that increased its production data stores from 32 TBs to 240 TBs of data. This growth plus new backup demands left Hansen uncertain as to if Herbalife could recover from data loss or application disruption should any type of outage occur - minor or major. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html increased its production data stores from 32 TBs to 240 TBs of data. This growth plus new backup demands left Hansen uncertain as to if Herbalife could recover from data loss or application disruption should any type of outage occur - minor or major.

The rapid explosion of data that Herbalife experienced only exacerbated the issues that Hansen was already having with his current backup software. So in his role as Principal IT Engineer, he was tasked with identifying a solution that addressed the problems Herbalife was encountering and could scale into a new environment. The specific problems that Hansen was encountering included:

  • No backup reporting. Hansen had little or no insight into the causes of why his backup jobs were failing or what steps he needed to take to fix them. Since his current backup software stored its indexes and backup job information in a SQL Server database, he had to write his own SQL queries to pull needed information out of the database to try to understand why backup jobs were failing.
  • Backups failing in the middle of bundled backup jobs. His backup software allowed him to bundle multiple backups for individual servers into one queue such that when the backup of one application server was complete, the backup of the next application server in the queue would begin. The problem that Hansen was encountering with this approach was two-fold. First, if the backup of one application server in the backup queue failed, all of the other backups after that application server in the queue would also fail. Second, it was very difficult to construct queries to find out exactly why the backup of a particular application server in the queue failed. As a result, Hansen was often left to guess exactly why his backups were failing since he did not have the time to research and diagnose the cause of each backup failure.
  • No Linux agents. Herbalife's new ERP application used an Oracle database that ran on a Linux platform. However Hansen's backup software did not offer Linux agents for Oracle backup at that time.
  • No integration between different instances of the same backup software. As part of Herbalife's ERP initiative, it was consolidating the management of its data in its central and remote sites so all of its resources could be centrally tracked and managed. When Hansen checked on how well his current backup software would support this new configuration, he discovered that there was no way to combine the different instances of the backup software catalogs at the central and remote sites so they functioned as one.
The scope of problems with his current backup software coupled with the growth of data in Herbalife's environment led him to conclude that Herbalife needed to upgrade to enterprise backup software to properly protect its new ERP environment to minimize its current level of exposure. So with these requirements in mind, Hansen brought in three enterprise backup software products for evaluation: CommVault® Simpana®, EMC Networker and Symantec NetBackup. In the next blog entry in this 3-part series, I'll take a look at what Hansen discovered during his evaluation of these three different products.  ]]> Dell and CommVault Bring Intelligent Plug-n-Scale Deduplication to the Midsize Market tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.900 2009-06-08T13:00:00Z 2009-06-08T13:00:00Z If one didn't know any better, one would think that deduplicating backup data is going to solve all of IT's backup pains. The current train of thought goes something along the lines of "Plug in a deduplicating appliance, point the backup software at the new appliance and, Voila!, the backup problems are solved." The only problem with that viewpoint is that deduplicating appliances alone do not solve equally pressing corporate data management problems and may even create new backup and data management challenges along the way. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html
The two potential problems that organizations that select a deduplicating disk-based backup appliance may encounter include:

  • Inability to scale the solution. As the amount of backup data grows, so do the requirements of the backup appliance, either from a capacity perspective, a performance perspective or both. Once one or the other of these two features on the deduplicating appliance is maxed out, organizations must purchase another appliance - either a secondary one or a larger one.
  • Silos of data. The problem of data silos emerges if a company elects to purchase a secondary appliance to complement their existing appliance and then do not migrate their existing deduplicated data to a larger appliance. This is likely what many companies will do for one very simple reason: economics. But when they do so, not only do they have to deduplicate the backup data from scratch again, they now create another repository where their backup data resides.
This does not mean some organizations should avoid deduplicating disk-based backup appliances. As long as it is a small organization with minimal amounts of backup data (under 1 terabyte of data), it will likely not encounter any issues since these are the types of loads these appliances are designed to handle. But if it is a midsize organization that has tens or even hundreds of TBs of data under management that require backup, it needs to take a moment and think about how best to proceed with not just deduplication but data management as well.

Deploying one of these deduplicating disk-based appliances will likely solve the immediate backup pain in a midsize organization. But in 3, 6, 9 or 12 months when the appliance is at capacity or maxed out on throughput, then what? Spending a huge amount of money to upgrade and migrate to a larger appliance is rarely seen as desirable by anyone in this economic climate so introducing a second less expensive appliance becomes the natural choice.

By doing so the organization starts going backwards again in regards to solving its backup problems. Now its IT staff is forced to start balancing the backup jobs between two (or more) appliances as they lose the benefits of deduplication from the first appliance since the second one does not have the deduplication index from the first and two silos of data are created that they need to manage.

So what's the alternative for midsize enterprises to just "throwing" deduplicating appliances at their backp problem? Well, you can still "throw" a deduplicating appliance at the problem, but just throw one at the problem that deduplicates and manages the data in a different manner. That's what today's announcement of the Dell PowerVault DL2000 bundled with the CommVault® Simpana® 8 with block deduplication is designed to solve. Because rather than just deduplicating the data after it is sent to the disk-based target, Simpana deduplicates the backup data before it is stored on the disk target.

The DL2000 offers a number of distinct advantages for midsize organizations.

  • First, it means that the DL2000, not a deduplicating backup appliance, manages the deduplication index. Because it manages the index, the DL2000 can store data on any PowerVault system - be it a Dell MD1000 disk array or an ML6000 tape library. So as an MD1000 disk array fills up an organization can leverage Simpana to move deduplicated data from disk to tape while losing none of the deduplication benefits that Simpana provides.
  • Second, using Simpana goes to the heart of what organizations should ideally be trying to accomplish. Deduplicating backup data on an appliance solves the immediate backup pain but does little or nothing to solve data management problems that are brewing beneath the surface in every organization. Because the DL2000 delivers a full-featured version of Simpana 8, if organizations want to take advantage of its archiving, content indexing or search capabilities later on, the foundation is in place for them to do so.
  • Third, if an organization uses advanced features like archiving on the DL2000, it solves another problem that deduplicating appliances do not - a means to stem the long term growth of data. By archiving aging and stagnant data on the front end, it reduces the amount of data that organizations need to backup which further shortens backup windows and recovery times and reduces the amount of data that the DL2000 needs to manage as part of its deduplicated data store.
  • Finally, midsize organizations are also looking to both consolidate and simplify the management of their backup data in remote offices. By deploying DL2000s both locally and remotely, all of their sites gain the benefits of deduplication plus they can use Simpana's replication feature to replicate deduplicated data from remote sites to a central site. Organizations thereby create a standard interface that they can use to manage backups, deduplication, recoveries and replication.
Deduplication is becoming much more than a backup feature - it is becoming an integral component of how backup is done. But organizations should not assume that there is only one way to do deduplication - the DL2000 proves that. So midsize enterprises especially need to look before they leap with deduplication to make sure that in the process of solving today's problems associated with backup and recovery they do not create larger problems tomorrow. The new DL2000 with CommVault Simpana 8 is one way that midsize organizations can avoid this scenario as it delivers deduplication while putting in the foundation to solve the longer term problems that deduplication can potentially create. ]]> CommVault Powers HDPS 8.0 in Ways Seen and Unseen to Deliver a Comprehensive Enterprise Solution tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.874 2009-05-12T18:00:00Z 2009-05-12T18:00:00Z Last Friday, May 8, 2009, the latest unemployment figures were released by the US Bureau of Labor and it was not a pretty sight with US unemployment rates reaching 8.9% in April 2009. But that number fails to tell the whole story. Granted, a lot of individuals are now looking for work but I also speak to a lot of IT staff who are still employed that now need to get their job done plus do the jobs of the individuals who were let go. These individuals need more integrated solutions that require less time to manage, not more. In that vein, the announcement that the Hitachi Data Protection Suite (HDPS) 8.0 will continue to be powered by CommVault (now in more ways than one) should be welcomed by enterprise organizations that need a robust and integrated data management and protection solution that extends across both hardware and software platforms. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html announcement that the Hitachi Data Protection Suite (HDPS) 8.0 will continue to be powered by CommVault (now in more ways than one) should be welcomed by enterprise organizations that need a robust and integrated data management and protection solution that extends across both hardware and software platforms.

Hitachi Data Systems' (HDS) decision to continue using CommVault® Simpana® to power HDPS 8.0 probably comes as no surprise to anyone. The relationship between HDS and CommVault goes back to 2004 when Hitachi first began to use CommVault Simpana to power HDPS. Further, this relationship has, by all accounts, worked out well for both of these organizations and the clients that they collectively serve.
 
The release of HDPS 8.0 is therefore noteworthy in that HDS can now deliver a much more robust solution stack to their customers for the management of data on both their primary and secondary storage systems. HDPS already supported archiving as a means to reduce data stores on primary storage by moving aging or select file types (JPEGs, MPEGs, etc) to lower cost secondary storage like the HDS AMS storage systems. Using this feature, organizations can archive data to lower HDS storage systems from production NetApp NAS filers that are near or at capacity.

The inclusion of block-based deduplication in HDPS 8.0 takes this existing functionality a step further. First, deduplication can dramatically lower the costs associated with the HDS AMS storage systems by enabling organizations to increase the amount of data that they can store on them by up to 15-fold.

However enterprises with remote and branch offices (ROBOs) that are looking to consolidate this data can leverage the full benefits that HDS brings to the table on an even larger scale. The combination of HDPS 8.0's deduplication and HDS's storage systems coupled with another feature of HDPS 8.0, its Data Replication feature, should enable organizations to cost-effectively introduce disk into these sites as a primary backup and recovery target that serves as the foundation for centralizing data protection.

By jointly deploying HDPS 8.0 and HDS AMS storage systems at these ROBOs, organizations receive an integrated hardware and software solution that is tested, validated and supported that increases backup and recovery success rates, reduces backup windows and takes tape management out of the equation at these sites. By adding the HDPS 8.0 Data Replication feature into the picture, organizations can now replicate this data back to the home office, possibly using existing network links since only net new deduplicated data at these is replicated back to the main office. Deduplication minimizes the amount of data that is both sent and stored in the enterprise and, because the deduplication is handled by HDPS, organizations can use the most appropriate HDS storage system at the ROBO or main office.

Today's news is around HDS's release of HDPS 8.0 and how it leverages CommVault to better protect virtualized environments, embedded deduplication and remote office protection. However of equal importance is the behind-the-scenes story that CommVault and HDS are working more closely together. In so doing, they are providing a more comprehensive solution that better leverages the expertise and strengths of both of their companies to solve the problems that enterprises are experiencing in both their data centers and remote offices. These new features and increases in collaboration combine to deliver an integrated, enterprise "Can't miss" solution that now overshadows many competitive offerings and should give enterprise organizations a renewed perspective on the total value proposition that HDS can deliver for enterprise data protection and management. ]]> New CommVault CommValue Program Addresses Growing Concerns about the Scalability of Support for eDiscovery and Multi-Tenet Solutions tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.791 2009-03-23T12:30:00Z 2009-03-23T12:30:00Z "Scalability is one of the biggest pitfalls that managed solution providers need to watch out for." That statement by ESG's Senior Channel Analyst, Paul Myerson, in a recent SearchITChannel podcast highlights one of the new difficulties that today's solutions providers are encountering, especially as they begin to implement solutions such as archiving and eDiscovery in all size customer accounts. Even though each customer's environment is different, customers still expect their reseller to quickly and cost-effectively deploy these increasingly complex solutions and then support them on an on-going basis. Yet finding a solution provider that has the skill sets and can cost-effectively scale to meet these new customer demands is still easier said than done. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html Paul Myerson, in a recent SearchITChannel podcast highlights one of the new difficulties that today's solutions providers are encountering, especially as they begin to implement solutions such as archiving and eDiscovery in all size customer accounts. Even though each customer's environment is different, customers still expect their reseller to quickly and cost-effectively deploy these increasingly complex solutions and then support them on an on-going basis. Yet finding a solution provider that has the skill sets and can cost-effectively scale to meet these new customer demands is still easier said than done.

It used to be that just enterprise organizations had complex configurations that required customized configurations and support from software and hardware providers. In fact, this is sometimes the unspoken rule as to when customers had to stop buying from resellers and begin buying hardware and software directly from the manufacturer as manufacturers could provide the higher level of expertise needed to manage and support these more complex environments. But with introduction of more complex data management solutions around virtualization, remote office, and eDiscovery requirements as applicable to small businesses as to large, small businesses now need their resellers to provide many of the same type of resources that once only reserved for enterprises.

That is what makes today's announcement about the new CommVault® CommValue® program so significant. Whereas before CommVault engineers were the primary individuals that had access to CommVault's Technical Resource Library, Knowledge Base and Education Services, the new CommValue program opens access to this information so any participating CommVault channel partner or VAR can draw from the same knowledge and experience as the vendor.

Specific benefits that resellers and their customers should see from the new CommVault CommValue program include:

  • Access to the CommVault Services Methodology. An area that CommVault is giving greater attention to is helping its customers realize a Return on Investment (ROI) in a shorter amount of time after buying its Simpana software. CommVault has been working with its own engineers for some time on its new DESIGN, BUILD and MANAGE methodology. Now it extends this methodology to its channel partners and VARs so their customers can more quickly deploy and scale the CommVault Simpana® software while driving costs out of their operations.
  • Closer relationships between resellers and customers. As customer environments get more complex and they demand more from their IT infrastructure to meet growing data volumes and new government requirements, they need resellers that they can rely upon to provide them the services they need. This is only possible if these resellers have the information and intelligence at their fingertips. With CommVault opening up the door to their knowledge base and education services resources, they can now more adeptly respond to these customer requirements while also improving their own technical proficiency and expertise.
  • More bang for the buck. A common problem among both resellers and customers is that they often are not aware of the power of the software that they just sold or bought. By CommVault making its internal technical resources available to its partners and resellers, they can learn more about Simpana's capabilities and features and encourage their customers to take greater advantage of them so they can derive more value from the software.
Thomas Moran, CommVault's Services Business Development Manager, explains that the introduction of CommValue helps CommVault partners and their customers overcome the feeling that they are trying to slash through the IT jungle on their own. Even those proficient with CommVault software - and maybe especially those proficient with CommVault software - understand that there are pitfalls and configuration hazards in every environment. Access to this deeper well of information can help them avoid many of these issues while deploying the software more quickly.

ESG's Myerson is right on the money in the sense that scalability is one of the biggest challenges that resellers and VARs face. Organizations of all sizes now, more so than ever, need to examine how well their solution provider can scale to solve the more complex problems that they face. This is exactly the issue that the new CommVault CommValue program is designed to address. By giving CommVault resellers and partners access to internal CommVault knowledge and resources, customers can expect less problems going forward when the Simpana software is installed and supported while receiving a higher quality of support from the reseller's engineers that support their environment.

]]> Taking the Discombobulation out of Services with "Design, Build and Manage" tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.774 2009-03-03T19:00:00Z 2009-03-03T19:00:00Z Streamlining organizational data management, access and protection from a configuration, implementation and support perspective has been a key focus of CommVault over the past year. This topic was obviously on the forefront of the mind of Robert Brower, CommVault's VP of Services and Technical Support, when he and I met last fall and discussed in a series of blogs how CommVault was evolving to address this common issue in customer environments. That conversation foreshadows the growing integration in CommVault® Services between its Professional Services, Support and Training divisions and how this integration could become the new template for what customers expect all vendors to deliver going forward. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html blogs how CommVault was evolving to address this common issue in customer environments. That conversation foreshadows the growing integration in CommVault® Services between its Professional Services, Support and Training divisions and how this integration could become the new template for what customers expect all vendors to deliver going forward.

Backup redesign is top of mind in many Fortune 1000 organizations with 33% of these companies listing it as their #1 storage priority in 2009 according to TheInfoPro's 2008 Wave 11 results. But the issue that these organizations run into as they start to look to redesign their backup infrastructures is how to best engage vendors who can help them in this initiative.

From my own personal experience, I know that vendors have inadequate processes in place to collectively manage the installation, training and support of their backup software in customer environments. Rather, each of these aforementioned divisions stands on their own with inadequate cooperation between them. When I asked Brower as to why this is so counterproductive, he used the example of an organization that calls upon a vendor to help it better protect the information in 10,000 of its email mail boxes.

Vendors tend to respond to these customer requests according to which of their three services organization receives the customer engagement. For instance, if the Professional Services (PS) organization is awarded the job, it may see it as a cut-and-dry 20-day services engagement. The PS staff will go to the customer site, archive all data over 30 - 90 days and then reconfigure the backup software to protect the remaining production data. However, they may not train the local IT staff on how to properly manage the email archive or backup software so once the PS staff is no longer on site, problems can and do resurface.

On the other end of the spectrum, if the Training organization handles the customer engagement, they train the customer on how to use the software. So the customer obtains training for managing the backup and email archive software but, after a week of training, only knows enough to be dangerous when it comes time to do the initial archive of the 10,000 mail boxes. It is when they start to archive all of this data, all sorts of things go wrong from slow performance on the email server to an improperly configured archive.

What then can occur in these scenarios is that the customer in desperation calls the vendor's Support organization. Support is then stuck with trying to fix the situation even as they privately wonder how this particular customer engagement got so screwed up in the first place. Meanwhile the customer is left feeling frustrated and left wondering what went wrong with their engagement with the vendor.

It is this discombobulated situation that Brower both sought to address and help differentiate CommVault from its competitors. His initiative has resulted in CommVault combining its Professional Services, Support and Training under simply "CommVault Services" and adopting the philosophy of "Design, Build and Manage" to tackle this longstanding issue.

Brower explains that with this new all-in-one Services organization, CommVault takes a "cradle-to-grave" approach with its clients. Now when customers or resellers come to CommVault with a project, all of the Services organization, whether that is Professional Services, Support, Training or some combination of all three, works together to deliver what the customer needs. In the earlier example of 10,000 email mail boxes, Brower said CommVault Services would now cooperate to recommend something like a week of training, 5-6 days of Professional Services to configure the migration and making a Support engineer available or even putting the engineer onsite while the migration occurs. "Everyone is now aware of where the project is at and the tasks that were completed so there are no more gaps in support," he says.

The "Design Build and Manage" philosophy extends this agile approach to services by enabling customers to engage their preferred services provider at each point from the design stage to deployment to the operation's life cycle.  With this new methodology CommVault can work directly with the customer or with the customer's preferred services partner. This agility ensures that the Services solution is not only technically sound and requirements 'right-sized' to meet customer objectives but also includes participation with all of the customer's trusted advisors.

CommVault's decision to bring its Professional Services, Support and Training divisions under one umbrella makes sense from both a tactical and strategic perspective. Immediately, companies should find it helpful to not have to navigate CommVault in order to receive the help they need. Rather when they reach out to CommVault to discuss a new or existing project, the individual they contact should have the information at his or her fingertips to help them answer their question. Strategically, this change further helps CommVault Services become more agile and, should this change work as well as Brower promises, gives both CommVault's customers and resellers greater confidence to proceed in any project that they engage with CommVault.
]]> New Simpana 8 Deduplication Features Should Give Enterprises Pause on their Deduplication Strategy tag:commvault.dciginc.com,2009://22.573 2009-01-26T08:05:00Z 2009-01-26T08:05:00Z Today's release of CommVault Simpana 8 continues to reflect CommVault's commitment to deliver enterprise data protection and management using a single product with multiple application modules. Yet it is Simpana 8's new global block-based data deduplication feature and new ability to deduplicate data stored to tape that is likely to raise excitement. Making these features integral to Simpana 8, CommVault does more than just give enterprises another deduplication option or simply lower tape costs. Instead it starts to put CommVault on a collision course with deduplicating storage appliances and even traditional tape devices while giving organizations new reason to ponder their longer term deduplication strategy. Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html release of CommVault Simpana 8 continues to reflect CommVault's commitment to deliver enterprise data protection and management using a single product with multiple application modules. Yet it is Simpana 8's new global block-based data deduplication feature and new ability to deduplicate data stored to tape that is likely to raise excitement. Making these features integral to Simpana 8, CommVault does more than just give enterprises another deduplication option or simply lower tape costs. Instead it starts to put CommVault on a collision course with deduplicating storage appliances and even traditional tape devices while giving organizations new reason to ponder their longer term deduplication strategy.

Data protection in whatever form it takes is becoming almost inextricably linked with data deduplication. In this respect, Simpana is no stranger to deduplication as it has provided file-based deduplication (single instance store or SIS) for some time. But the big news in Simpana 8 is the introduction of client-side, global block-based data deduplication and extension of deduplication to tape.

The benefits of client-side deduplication are already well known in that it reduces the overhead on physical servers and network infrastructure by deduplicating new blocks of data on the client before transmitting them.  This helps to reduce backup windows, reduces the performance overhead on both the source server and target storage device and ultimately results in less traffic on the network.

The advantage that block-based deduplication provides over file based deduplication will vary by organization.  Using the new block-based deduplication, it is now reasonable for organizations to expect to achieve a four to five fold improvement in deduplication rations assuming they can attain a 20:1 data reduction ratio using block-based deduplication versus the file-based deduplication method that delivers approximately a 4:1 ratio.

Organizations that will benefit the most from this new form of block-based deduplication are those that use Simpana to protect MS Exchange data stores and Oracle and MS SQL databases. File-based deduplication provides little or no benefit from a deduplication benefit for application databases since databases are more regularly updated and file-based deduplication techniques cannot analyze these data stores to remove empty spaces. This is a major reason organizations would still see benefits using block-based deduplicating storage appliances in conjunction with the previous release of Simpana.

Simpana 8 changes that assumption. Now that organizations can deduplicate data at a block level instead of at a file-level, the reason to deploy a block-based deduplication storage appliance to store backup data becomes moot.

In fact, the argument against using a deduplication appliance for organizations using CommVault becomes even stronger due to CommVault's decision to extend the storage of deduplicated data to tape. Normally when organizations implement deduplication, only data stored to disk is deduplicated. This does not take into account that many organizations still copy data to tape for archival and offsite data protection purposes. But to store deduplicated data on tape requires they first reconstitute the deduplicated data before copying it to tape. This adds overhead and time to the copying process as organizations must first rehydrate data plus rehydrated data consumes significantly more tape than if it were left in a deduplicated state.

Simpana 8 eliminates this need to reconstitute backup data before sending it to tape. Instead it copies deduplicated data directly from disk to tape as it can track what deduplicated data is stored on each tape and then rebuild files without adding undue latency to restore times. By overcoming this important hurdle, it speeds the time organizations can copy data from disk to tape plus it can reduce the number of tapes that organizations need to create and store data on by as much as 90%. This reduces both upfront tape cartridge and drive costs and ongoing offsite storage costs for tape since less tape is sent offsite.

Now having said all this about Simpana's new deduplication capabilities, there a couple of other new features in Simpana 8 that I also wanted to highlight and will plan to dive into further detail in forthcoming blog entries:

  • New agentless backup options for VMware ESX servers. Rather than requiring the installation of agents on each virtual machine (VM) or relying upon backup administrators to monitor each ESX server, Simpana now communicates with the ESX server. Using this technique, it can discover exactly what VMs reside on an ESX server host and then use VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) to protect newly created VMs. In larger enterprise environments, Simpana can also leverages VMware vCenter's information about the virtual infrastructure to discover what VMs are on each ESX servers and then protect them.
  • Extends its content indexing, data protection and search features to organizational desktops and laptops. This new feature closes the loop on CommVault's enterprise data protection strategy for these devices but as importantly gives organization new flexibility to index and search data on them as well as introduces templates that organizations can use to start to automate their compliance requirements.
CommVault Simpana 8 provides a number of evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary changes though its introduction of global disk-based deduplication and extension of deduplication to tape are arguably more revolutionary in nature. However those close to CommVault will still see the underlying Simpana architecture shine through as CommVault can continue to innovate and build upon Simpana's foundation without requiring organizations to do a complete rip-and-replace of earlier releases.

Enterprises want a data protection and management platform that can gracefully age and grow. The introduction of desktop and laptop support, more compliance functions and new integration with enterprise storage systems for more recovery option and agentless support for virtual servers indicate that CommVault is delivering on these less-publicized enterprise demands.  So while its new block-based deduplication and deduplicating data to tape are the ones that will likely grab the headlines and prompt organizations to rethink their deduplication strategies, it is these other evolutionary changes that also impact enterprises on a day-to-day basis that will keep them loyal to CommVault and coming back for more.  ]]>