CommVault® Systems

CommVault Takes another Step towards Bringing Cloud Storage Down to Earth

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.

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

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.

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

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. 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

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.

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

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. In the realm of eDiscovery, there are even efforts to automate the data classification process in order to define repeatable and defensible processes should the business be subjected to an eDiscovery request. 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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. 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

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. 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

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.

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

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. 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

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. 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
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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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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"

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.

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

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.

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.

Integrated Backup and Replication: It's as much about Stopping the Bleeding as it is Recovering the Data

2009-01-07T11:00:00Z

I regularly write about the inner workings of current and new technologies and how they can benefit organizations from a technical and financial perspective. But when talking to individuals out in the field who are actually using these products, it provides me with an entirely different perspective as to what specific benefits they glean from using them. In fact, when I recently chatted with InfoReliance's John Chirhart, a consultant to the US Government, he said that after he completed his recent testing of CommVault's Simpana Replication and Backup/Restore, he had to re-examine what data protection strategy that he should recommend to his clients and how they should manage data protection going forward.

At a high level, the benefits of using both Simpana Replication and Backup/Restore are intuitively obvious. Administrators can select the best data protection option for each application and then use a common console to create and put in effect the appropriate management policies for either product. Further, all of the protected data is then stored and indexed by Simpana.

But those in the field who are already testing and using Simpana Replication and Backup/Restore are finding this integrated solution is changing their perspective on data protection in other ways. One of the biggest changes that InfoReliance's Chirhart sees coming out of the merger of these two technologies is the creation of a common team that manages both backup and disaster recoveries.

Companies now often use different teams to manage the replication software and the backup software since the replication software is used primarily for off-site disaster recoveries while backup software is used in the day-to-day recoveries of emails, databases and files. But by bringing both of these technologies together, it eliminates the labor associated with managing each one independently and makes it possible for companies to combine the two teams normally required to manage these products into one.

A distinct advantage Chirhart also sees is the elimination of the need to train people on the other product. He has worked with other replication products that required either him or his staff to attend week-long boot camps to learn how to configure and manage the product. Even once the training was complete, he still needed to purchase that vendor's professional services to configure and install the product plus it took a substantial amount of time to manage the product once it was installed.

He has not found that true with Simpana Replication and Backup/Restore. Since he is already using Simpana Backup/Restore, he understood Simpana's architecture and could deploy the Replication software without the need to get CommVault Professional Services or support directly involved. Then because the two products are integrated, his existing backup team could manage Replication jobs just like Backup/Restore jobs using the existing Simpana management console.

Chirhart does not view the combined Simpana Replication and Backup/Restore as a package that can solve every replication need that a company may have. Rather he sees Simpana's host-based replication solution as providing a broad range of benefits to companies that can help them "stop the bleeding" associated with their day-to-day backups while giving them a more effective way to recover their data. As this occurs, he sees the day rapidly approaching where the industry comes to view integrated replication and backup/restore not as an option but as the standard way that companies protect their data.

Impetus for Consolidated Archived Data Stores Now Transcends Cost and Compliance Concerns

2008-12-03T19:00:00Z

The data archiving landscape is undergoing a transformation and no where are these changes more evident than in how companies archive data found on their corporate file servers or in their Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft SharePoint data stores. While the impetus for archiving this data in the past was driven by either operational (save storage space or performance improvements) or compliance concerns (satisfy legal concerns), today's companies must take both objectives into account when selecting an archiving solution. But to do so companies need software that can access these application data stores, move the appropriate data and archive it on various kinds of media (disk, optical or tape) and then later search, manage and retrieve this data when it is needed from this media.

Accessing and then archiving data from production application data stores is easier said than done. Of the aforementioned application servers (file servers, Exchange and SharePoint), they each require different techniques to archive data found in their respective data stores. For instance, file servers offer features and functionality that vary according to their underlying file systems and it is not unusual for companies to use file servers from different vendors. Since file systems on the file servers differ according to vendor (Linux, Windows, or UNIX) the archiving software must take each file systems' specific features into account when archiving data from these systems.

Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint present a different set of problems. When archiving data from Exchange, the archiving software often needs to make a copy of the message or file as soon as it enters Exchange to satisfy corporate compliance requirements. Later, after a specified period of time has passed, the archiving software then needs to clean up the application production data store and move aging data (30 - 90 days or older) to the appropriate media that satisfies corporate cost and compliance concerns. In the case of SharePoint, there is no effective way to journal the messages as they enter SharePoint so the archiving software must regularly run incremental jobs throughout the day.

So what's the point of this blog entry (other than to show archiving data is not trivial)? Primarily it is to point out that even though both compliance and cost concerns are motivating companies to archive the data found in their rapidly growing file server, Exchange and SharePoint data stores, the complexities associated with managing the archives from any one of these data stores are significant.

But the new reality that more enterprise companies are coming to see is that they need to archive data for not just one of these application types but all three. If companies find themselves in this situation, they should also recognize that they need to identify and select archiving software that supports each of these application types without making the management of the archived data stores untenable. Using different archiving software products can, and likely will, result in disparate management interfaces, archiving policies and data stores. These then create their own levels of complexity both in terms of managing data archives on a day-to-day basis as well as later on when it comes time to search and retrieve the archived data or restrict and/or preserve the data as part of an eDiscovery or legal hold.

In this respect, the CommVault® Simpana® software suite has set itself apart from competitors. Not only can companies archive data residing on corporate file servers or in Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint data stores using the different options available within its Simpana software, it can store and manage data from all of these various sources in one location. The benefits that companies derive from using CommVault to archive all of this data include:

Training their personnel on one interface
Setting policies though one console that apply to all of these data stores
Managing all archived data in the same way regardless of what the source of the data is
Searching retrieve archived data through a common product

Every enterprise company is coming face-to-face with the need to archive their data in their fast growing data stores: file servers, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint. But as they do so, they are also beginning to encounter not only the complexities associated with archiving data for each of these data stores but the longer term challenges associated with managing the archives after they are created. In this respect, CommVault Simpana is unique in that companies can use it to access and archive data from any of these aforementioned application data stores, store the data in one repository and then manage and search these archived stores through one common interface.

CommVault Enhancements to Reseller Program Bring New Value to Technology Managers

2008-11-18T13:45:00Z

Savvy technology managers of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) understand three things about the rapidly changing nature of technologies in today's world:

First, they know running their core business consumes all of their time and the last thing that they have time to do is track every change in technology and which ones are relevant to their business and which ones are not.
Second, they also understand that if they are not constantly updating their businesses with relevant, cost-effective technologies, they loose their competitive edge in the market place.
Third, they know how important it is to partner with resellers that they trust will act in their best interests, guide them in their selection of technologies for their businesses need and who can then support them as they grow.

Yet a critical element missing in this three-step process is how to establish if the reseller or VAR that they rely upon is keeping pace with their company's needs and providing them with the appropriate level of guidance in accordance with the size of their business? Even assuming they are comfortable that their current reseller is meeting their needs, what criteria can they use to establish the credibility of their reseller so they can achieve a greater sense of assurance that they are using the right one for their business?

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to these questions since programs vary according to the vendors which the resellers represent. However, changes announced today in CommVault's channel program provide greater insight into what technology managers at least should expect from current CommVault resellers and go a long way towards demonstrating how prepared these resellers are to support their business.

Under CommVault's enhanced reseller program, CommVault resellers will now fall into one of three tiers which are laid out as follows (from lowest to highest), each with specific reseller requirements:

Authorized. Becoming an authorized CommVault partner requires the least amount of work for a CommVault partner to achieve. The reseller needs to provide one sales and one technical resource that each need to pass an online accreditation course as well as training on CommVault products.

Gold. Gold CommVault partners must satisfy the requirements of the Authorized program plus have an additional sales resource (total of 2) and one engineer that are certified in CommVault's Simpana software. To achieve this certification, the engineer has to complete two 5-day training classes at CommVault's facilities. Further, the Gold partner has to reach a specified sales target every year.

Platinum. Platinum CommVault partners (of which there are currently 4) must meet all of the requirements of the Authorized and Gold programs plus have two (2) certified CommVault engineers on staff and satisfy a still higher annual software sales target.

What these revised programs for CommVault's resellers mean to technology managers that engage with them is that they can now more clearly understand at a high level exactly what the value-add of CommVault resellers are at each tier. Further, it can help both the technology manager and the reseller establish appropriate expectations going forward. For instance, it is only logical to expect that as a company grows the complexity and demands of its IT infrastructure will change. These tiers enable technology managers to quickly establish if the reseller is technically savvy enough to support his growing business and use these credentials to justify internally why the company should use this preferred partner.

Technology managers in most SMBs often rely upon their resellers as sources for advice as to how to best move their company forward technologically. But technology managers also sometimes need assurances that their resellers have the needed technical background and qualifications to do this and a means to objectively measure that. CommVault's three new certification tiers helps to more clearly establish how its partner programs work, and provide technology managers deeper insight into what they should realistically expect to obtain from the reseller delivering CommVault solutions with which they are engaged.

For Many 2009 Means IT Staff and Budget Cuts while the "Do More with Less" Mandate Remains

2008-11-11T13:20:00Z

If companies thought that times were tough over the last few years, 2009 is shaping up to be a doozy. Corporate layoffs, cutbacks in spending and decreased revenue coupled with the looming threat of more government regulation and oversight will make the last few years seem like a cake walk compared to what is to come. But as companies prepare to make even more cutbacks in IT staff and budgets, the "Do more with less" mandate that seems to accompany every round of corporate cutbacks remains. This directive leaves IT survivors needing to identify technology providers that can help them better manage their company's data, recover their enterprise applications more quickly and perform these tasks with minimal training, time and effort.

Just a month ago in October 2008, Gartner cut its 2009 forecast for IT spending from 5.8 to 2.3 percent and warns that it will cut its forecast even further if the economy continues to weaken. In the month since Gartner issued that forecast, a lot has occurred in the global economy and it does not take a genius to figure out that further cuts in its IT spending forecast are all but a foregone conclusion. One only needs to look at the increase in October's unemployment figures and the headlines about more companies hoping that the government bails them out for this to become self-evident. Further, since IT is the number two expense in most organizations right behind human resources, expect IT budgets to show up next on the chopping block. But as enterprise companies start to look at their 2009 IT budget, where do they begin to cut?

In many companies, their IT infrastructure is not a pretty picture. On one front, they see incessant and unending data growth regardless of what occurs in the economy or how many people they lay off. So they cannot automatically cut the amount of storage they are purchasing. Rather they need to examine what tiers of storage they are placing their data on and then ensure that data is ending up on the right storage tiers. But that's time-consuming as placing the data on the right tier of storage at the right time so it meets internal and external requirements is no trivial task. To do this, companies need to look to streamline and automate the placement, movement and retention of data which requires that companies understand their data in the first place and then use that information to place and move it between storage tiers.

Even assuming enterprises deliver on these initial data management and storage optimization objectives, companies still need to protect the data, recover it and then access and search it to meet forthcoming litigation concerns. It is no secret that there is a new President in the White House and part of his mandate (implied or otherwise) is to introduce more accountability into the business and financial world. The logical outcome of this is to expect even more legislation with new regulations and compliance requirements. This translates into companies needing to access and search their data repositories faster with less people than before.

So as companies look at what to keep and cut in their IT budgets, the decision should be based on more than the cost of the technology alone. Rather, companies need to focus on how well their current or proposed technology providers will deliver on these new demands that 2009 will impose upon them to automate and simplify their IT environment. Equally important, companies need to ascertain that vendors are doing everything in their power to work together and deliver on these new objectives.

For instance, the CommVault® Simpana® software suite has long automated many of these aforementioned data management tasks but that does not mean it is standing still. Just today CommVault announced that it is enhancing its strategic relationship with NetApp to better address these emerging corporate archiving, storage optimization and eDiscovery concerns. NetApp reciprocated by also recognizing CommVault as a strategic partner so companies can better use the CommVault Simpana software suite in conjunction with its FAS storage systems to increase storage efficiencies and drive down storage costs.

Though a relationship between CommVault and NetApp has existed for some time (nearly 10 years) and they have provided integration across their respective product lines in archive, backup, replication and eDiscovery during that time, this latest announcement illustrates new synergies that companies can achieve using these products. Since NetApp provides a common platform across all of its storage systems and CommVault delivers an integrated data management platform, companies can realize the benefits that both of these two vendors' products deliver by created a unified infrastructure from the software down to the underlying storage systems. In so doing, the sum of the benefits of using these two platforms in conjunction with one another becomes greater than using them individually.

Most companies see a rough ride ahead in 2009 and for many companies that ride has already begun. Companies are already cutting back on both their IT staff and budgets but are also realizing that they cannot also lower expectations and deliverables because today's world does not permit it. This realization should force companies to change both how they procure technology and what factors influence their buying decisions. This morning's announcement concerning the enhanced strategic relationship between CommVault and NetApp so companies can better automate the management of their IT infrastructure is just one example of the new forces that are at work and for which companies must now account for and take advantage of as they plan for 2009 and make their 2009 technology buying decisions.

Where O Where is Your Backup Data and Can You Find It When You Need it?

2008-11-05T11:00:00Z

All enterprise businesses backup their data but how confident are they that they can restore it? As more companies adopt disk as their primary target for backup, they can be lulled into a false sense of security thinking that their issues associated with recovery are gone. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, what some companies are finding out is that while their immediate backup problems are solved, their issues surrounding recovery are just beginning. Tape typically remains part of many companies' backup processes so the movement and recovery of data from tape media cannot be ignored and even recovering backup data from disk after it is copied to another disk system is not without its challenges.

A specific problem that companies need to keep in mind is how do they recover data after it is no longer kept only on the disk subsystem on which it was initially stored? Backup data can be moved from disk to tape or other disk systems by a variety of methods. The backup software may copy the backup data from disk to tape. The disk subsystem may replicate the backup job to another disk subsystem at another site. There are even some disk subsystems that can copy backup data to disk or tape. This all means that there are a lot of ways for backup data to get lost or misplaced after the backup to disk is complete.

Probably the best way currently for companies to avoid this scenario is to use the backup software to manage the placement and movement of all of the data short and long term to facilitate recoveries. Yet even in this situation, there is no guarantee that companies can recover data as rapidly as they might expect. The issue that companies run into is that as their production data stores grow, so do their backup data stores. As that occurs, the index or catalog that is needed to track how much backup data companies have and where it is at also increases in size.

The problem that then begins to emerge over time, especially when data is restored at sites other than the primary site or during disaster recoveries, is that companies need to first restore the backup software's catalog before they can restore any data at the remote site. How long this takes will depend on the backup software product in question as well as the size of the backup software catalog though I have heard stories that this catalog restore can take 24 hours or more to complete.

But not every product manages its backup software catalog this way. To mitigate this problem and track backup data regardless of where it is located or on what type of media, the CommVault® Simpana® software suite uses a distributed index. CommVault keeps a small MS SQL 2005 DB on the CommServer with pointers to a component of the index retained with each backup job. To recover the data, all that companies need is the CommVault Simpana server software installed at the recovery site, a copy of the small ER Backup of the SQL 2005 DB and the media (disk, tape or optical) with a copy of the Job on it.

The Simpana software then reads the data regardless of what kind of media it is stored on (disk, optical or tape) or how it got to the recovery site (Simpana may have vaulted the data or a disk subsystem may have replicated the backup job to another system at the remote site). In either case, Simpana can reconstruct the backup job and the data in it regardless of the type of media it resides based upon the information found in the index of each backup job.

The plethora of media types to which companies can store backup data and the way that data can be managed after it is backed up has mushroomed in the last few years. All of these options to store and move backup data are creating exciting new possibilities for driving down the ongoing costs of data management as well as opening new doors for data recoveries. But if companies forget to concern themselves with how to track and locate this data in an effective, efficient manner as they move it from media to media and site to site and not use a product that addresses these issues, they should not have a great deal of confidence that when it comes time to find and recover the data that they can recover it as quickly as the business may expect or need.

Creating the Extensible Services and Support Organization; Interview with CommVault VP Robert Brower

2008-10-28T10:00:00Z

This is the second part in a two-part series with Robert Brower, CommVault's VP of Services and Technical Support, Americas. In this entry, Brower examines how his team is evolving to meet the emerging enterprise requirements of data management and protection and why creating an extensible services and support organization is now a prerequisite to supporting enterprise companies. Brower explains that in order for companies to get beyond their current break-fix mentality of managing backups, they need software that transforms corporate data into information. This only occurs if the software is properly implemented in the first place and then customers understand how to use and manage the software long term. This begins with a Services and Technical Support organization that wants to see companies realize this objective.

Jerome: What are some of the initial questions and surveys that CommVault uses to gather data when it goes into a new customer account?

Robert: The CommVault Professional Services (PS) team follows a series of information gathering steps to first document the customer environment. CommVault initially sends an email to the customer's account team so he or she can gather preliminary technical information about that customer's environment. Once that information is gathered, the team does a risk assessment of the client account as well as a gap analysis so it can close those information gaps in the customer account. The team then meets with the customer to identify and set expectations plus gather the final information it needs about the customer's environment. At this point, the PS team has a thorough baseline to work from as it builds out and deploys the software in the customer environment.

Jerome: As CommVault grows its Services (PS) and Technical Support organization, how is it leveraging the information and insight it gains from past and current projects to improve the process going forward?

Robert: One of CommVault's objectives is to leverage the experience we gain at each customer account and make that experience extensible throughout our services and support organization so we can use that regardless of where our customers are located. By doing this, CommVault can treat every customer as a special project and not try to fit them into one specific mode.

Let me explain. CommVault recently did a global implementation with a company that had locations in multiple geographies around the world. While some sites were obviously in North America, the company also had remote offices in locations such as Africa and the South Pacific. The biggest challenge we find in accounts like these is that the company often does not have enterprise data management standards, especially at its remote locations. So as part of the implementation we need to create standards that are suitable for these remote offices.

This is easier said than done. In this particular case, some of these remote offices only received supplies (new tapes, computer equipment, etc.) on a quarterly basis which had to be flown in so CommVault had to adapt the client's backup processes to the reality of each of these sites. To facilitate this, CommVault provides a worldwide portal to which every CommVault engineer has access. Using this portal, engineers can search for like circumstances in previous customer engagements and use that knowledge when configuring and supporting new environments. In these remote offices, CommVault was able to take the reliability of the backups from under 50% to nearly 90% which is fairly good considering the environment in which they need to operate.

Jerome: What about CommVault's VARs? Are customers better served by buying directly from CommVault or can they expect similar levels of support when buying from VARs?

Robert: CommVault applies the same standards to our partners as it applies to its engineers. To facilitate this, CommVault gives them access to the same information that its engineers have access to. CommVault also offers boot camps for engineers so whether a customer calls CommVault or a CommVault partner, they should have the same type of experience since they have access to the same information and tools to which CommVault's engineers have access.

Jerome: What is your vision for the future of this group?

Robert: No customer wants to hear from the Professional Services or Technical Support team that the product is broken and we are working on a fix. Instead CommVault wants its customers to assume that the product works. If they view it that way, they can think about their data from a more holistic perspective. This allows customers to understand what data they have and where it is so they can access it when they need it. As part of doing that, companies need to better understand the product that they are using and how to use it. Our objective is to help them accomplish that by helping them convert the data they manage into information that they can use to run their business. By having a co-joined Services and Technical Services team, CommVault can move its clients closer to this goal.

Part 1 of this series examined the new challenges facing CommVault's Professional Services and Technical Support teams as it engages prospective customers and how this is changing the customer experience with backup software.

Resolving Corporate Compliance and eDiscovery Fire Drills Provide Impetus for New CommVault-McAfee Alliance

2008-10-21T12:30:00Z

If there are any two disciplines within corporate IT that should be in the process of becoming best friends, if not inextricably linked, it is security and storage. Storage management teams routinely send data offsite on tape or optical media, grant administrators or users permissions to search production or archived data stores during eDiscoveries or change backup policies on the fly with minimal or no supervision. The problem that emerges is that when companies are asked to prove that they can comply with certain laws or to respond to a legal eDiscovery, it turns into a corporate fire drill with security and storage scrambling to prove they managed corporate data according to preset corporate policies. This begins to change with today's announcement between CommVault and McAfee, Inc, as it creates a new mechanism for companies to proactively monitor corporate data while preventing corporate data leakage.

Anyone who is even remotely close to the data storage management and enterprise security management disciplines within companies knows that about the only overlap that often occurs between these two departments is during internal meetings. There is mutual respect for each other and sometimes even high-level discussions about working more closely together but, to date, cooperation between these two teams remains at the surface level simply because there are no internal forces working to make this a reality.

Now, new forces for these two disciplines to cooperate have emerged, primarily driven by corporate legal departments. Revisions in 2006 to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have necessitated changes in the scope, speed and thoroughness of how companies perform eDiscoveries as well as retain data subject to legal holds. Furthermore, increased enforcement of laws such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and SEC Rules 17-a3 & 17-a4 is creating a new onus for security and storage to work as one.

The pressure is largely coming from corporate legal departments. When government auditors or third party legal counsels show up at corporate offices, they of course go first to the corporate legal departments to ask for proof of compliance or specific electronic records, not corporate security or storage departments. In order to respond to these requests, the company legal department immediately turns to its company's IT security and storage departments who are often ill-equipped to produce the data, where it currently resides, or any type of common audit log that documents how they have managed the data or who has had access to it over the last few years.

Avoiding these types of corporate fire drills is the initial impetus behind the strategic partnership that CommVault and McAfee have now formed. In order to produce audit logs and dashboards depicting how their data is managed, CommVault and McAfee are going to integrate their two products with the first level of integration to occur using the McAfee ePolicy Ochestrator (ePO) interface and scheduled for release in early 2009.

ePO was chosen as the portal to present this information based on feedback that CommVault and McAfee independently received from their respective customer bases. Legal departments initially look to corporate security software such as McAfee ePO to track information on corporate data movement and changes to data security policies even if it is the storage management team doing the data movement and setting the security policies. The McAfee ePO will take advantage of CommVault APIs to obtain auditing and policy metadata from the CommVault® Simpana® software suite so that companies can use ePO as a common portal to monitor and report on such tasks as: the success and failure rates of backup jobs; changed backup and/or storage management policies; identify backup jobs that ran when they should not have; confirm tapes are taken offsite and returned; and, identify servers that are not being backed up.

Corporate legal departments are under increasing pressure to produce information quickly that is reliable and authoritative that can satisfy external compliance and eDiscovery requests and internal fire drills do not cut it anymore. To meet these emerging requirements, corporate storage and security teams need to actually work together in a more formal way and produce the information that is needed to satisfy these requests without breaking either corporate budgets or processes. This new strategic partnership between CommVault and McAfee and the forthcoming integration between their respective software products will provides a new mechanism for this to occur. Security and storage teams can now efficiently and effectively meet the expectations of internal legal departments while still allowing these two disciplines to maintain a high level of autonomy within their company.