CommVault® Systems

CommVault® Systems http://commvault.dciginc.com/ CommVault® is determined to develop a better paradigm to manage data. A paradigm that would not attempt merely to "integrate" disparate solutions, but would spawn solutions designed to work together from a single, infinitely-adaptable code. A paradigm that would not merely address current data management needs, but that would anticipate and meet needs yet to come. The paradigm would be more accessible, adaptable, flexible and powerful than any data management solution to date. That paradigm is defined as Solving Forward. CommVault® Systems, Inc. DCIG is paid a fee by CommVault® Systems, Inc. in connection with this blog. CommVault® undertakes no obligation to update, correct or modify any statements contained in this blog; these statements represent the views and opinions of DCIG only. en Copyright 2010 Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0600 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html CommVault Takes another Step towards Bringing Cloud Storage Down to Earth
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. ]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2010/02/commvault-takes-another-step-t.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2010/02/commvault-takes-another-step-t.html Cloud Computing Data Management Disk Based Backup Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html CommVault Tames the Mac; Windows and Mac Can Play Nice Together 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.
]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/12/commvault-tames-the-mac.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/12/commvault-tames-the-mac.html Archiving Networked Storage Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:00:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html CommVault Puts Database Archives on Enterprise Dashboards 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. ]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/12/commvault-puts-database-archiv.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/12/commvault-puts-database-archiv.html Archiving Electronic Discovery Search Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:15:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html Psychic Abilities No Longer a Prerequisite When Searching Corporate Data Repositories 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. ]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/11/psychic-abilities-no-prerequisite.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/11/psychic-abilities-no-prerequisite.html Electronic Discovery Legal Hold Microsoft Exchange Search Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:00:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html Manual Classification of Data is Still a Best Practice when Developing a Repeatable and Defensible Process
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.
]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/09/manual-classification-of-data.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/09/manual-classification-of-data.html Electronic Discovery Governance Risk and Compliance Legal Hold Litigation Readiness Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:00:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html As Organizations Bring on Cloud Storage CommVault Brings on the Data Management
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. ]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/09/as-organizations-bring-on-clou.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/09/as-organizations-bring-on-clou.html Archiving Cloud Computing Data Management Electronic Discovery Search Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:00:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html Cloud Storage only Provides for Bigger Storage Buckets not Better Data Management Solutions
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. ]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/09/cloud-storage-bigger-storage-buckets.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/09/cloud-storage-bigger-storage-buckets.html Archiving Cloud Computing Data Protection Electronic Discovery Legal Hold Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:00:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html Finally! A Vendor That Comes to You Instead of You Having to Go to Them 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.
]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/08/finally-a-vendor-that-comes-to.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/08/finally-a-vendor-that-comes-to.html Data Management Data Protection Deduplication Virtualization Wed, 05 Aug 2009 05:00:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html CommVault® Simpana® is in Right Place at the Right Time as more Users Want 'Two-Fers' for their IT Dollars 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. ]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/07/commvault-simpana-is-in-right.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/07/commvault-simpana-is-in-right.html Archiving Data Management Deduplication DPRM Virtualization Tue, 28 Jul 2009 05:00:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html Explosive Data Growth Prompts Change in Herbalife's Backup Strategy
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. ]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/07/explosive-data-growth-prompts.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/07/explosive-data-growth-prompts.html Data Protection Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:00:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html CommVault Simpana Delivers the "Wow" During Herbalife's Backup Software Evaluation 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.
]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/07/commvault-simpana-delivers-wow.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/07/commvault-simpana-delivers-wow.html Archiving Data Protection Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:00:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html Deduplication can be a Quick Backup Fix but Permanent Data Management Solutions Exist steps to fix them are so painful and complicated that they are desperately looking for a quick fix. So when a technology like deduplication comes along that appears to do exactly that, their initial reaction is to buy it. But organizations should not fail to consider other products that include deduplication technology as part of their solution. These solutions can provide the quick backup fix that organizations crave while addressing persistent, underlying data management issues that also need attention.

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

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

But here is the trap that organizations must be careful not to fall into when looking to deploy deduplication when it is part of a target-based deduplication appliance. The primary promises that target-based deduplication appliance providers confidently make regarding deduplication are reducing backup times, improving backup success rates and reducing data stores.

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

This is where organizations need to recognize deduplicating target-based appliances for what they really are. They provide a 3, 6 or even a 12 month respite from an organization's current backup problems by suppressing the symptoms of out-of-control data growth. However they do little or nothing to stem an organization's underlying problems around continual data growth, managing data retention and searches of archived, backup or production data.

While in good times organizations may be able to sweep this issue under the rug, a recent blog by CommVault's David West makes the point that a perfect storm is descending upon organizations. Inefficient IT processes, immature backup software, shrinking budgets, flat or declining head counts and growing legal requirements to discover and produce data is forcing organizations to spend their money more prudently
.
As they do so, they need to think more strategically about what solutions they buy. They can no longer expect to just throw money at a problem in the hopes that it will magically go away and, if it does not, then receive more money next quarter or next year to try to deal with the issue then. Those days are coming to an end if not already over.

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

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

The hype around deduplication has not been all bad as it has served to provide greater attention on the issue of backup with which many organizations struggle. But organizations that view deduplication as some type of silver bullet for their backup problems are setting themselves up for disappointment down the road. There are no silver bullets to solving long term backup problems but data management software like CommVault Simpana does a remarkable job of providing a short term fix while delivering a platform as a long term solution that fits the needs of most any size organization. ]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/06/deduplication-can-be-a-quick-b.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/06/deduplication-can-be-a-quick-b.html Archiving Data Management Deduplication Disk Based Backup Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:00:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html Herbalife's Organic Data Growth Creates Unexpected Backup Challenges 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. ]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/06/herbalifes-organic-data-growth.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/06/herbalifes-organic-data-growth.html Data Protection DPRM Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:00:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html Dell and CommVault Bring Intelligent Plug-n-Scale Deduplication to the Midsize Market
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. ]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/06/dell-and-commvault-bring-intel.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/06/dell-and-commvault-bring-intel.html Archiving Data Management Deduplication Physical Tape Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:00:00 -0600 Jerome M. Wendt http://sales.dciginc.com/about/jeromemwendtbiography.html CommVault Powers HDPS 8.0 in Ways Seen and Unseen to Deliver a Comprehensive Enterprise Solution 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. ]]> http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/05/commvault-powers-hdps-80-in-wa.html http://commvault.dciginc.com/2009/05/commvault-powers-hdps-80-in-wa.html Archiving Data Management Deduplication Storage Systems Virtualization Tue, 12 May 2009 13:00:00 -0600