• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This question of enterprise caliber professional services and technical support is one that CommVault® Systems has addressed as its Simpana® software suite makes inroads into more enterprise accounts. But as it does, CommVault is finding the need to evolve its Professional Services (PS) and Technical Support organizations to support these accounts. To understand how CommVault is doing so, I recently had the opportunity to meet with Robert Brower, CommVault's VP of Services and Technical Support, Americas, to discuss this topic.

Jerome: What are the new challenges that CommVault faces as it provides services and support for today's enterprise organizations?

Robert: In the enterprise backup software space, there are no more green fields left (i.e. - CommVault no longer expects to enter a new account and not find it with one or more versions of enterprise backup software). CommVault has adapted the nature of its Services and Technical Support as to how it approaches global enterprise customers. It needs to help companies transition from their current backup software to CommVault's Simpana suite. To do so requires that client engagements sometimes begin before the customer ever signs on the dotted line.

The Services and Technical Support organization is now brought in early in the sales cycle to help explain to the CIO CommVault's value proposition. To a certain degree, a CIO does not care which backup product his company uses. So explaining how CommVault deploys its Simpana software in the company's environment in a timely manner has become an extraordinarily important part of the sales process.

Jerome: Since CommVault's Professional Services and Technical Support team is involved so early on in the sales process at the customer account, how does that change the customer experience?

Robert: CommVault's PS team's involvement early-on in the sales process gives us an edge when it comes times to deploy the software since we gain needed insight into the customer environment. The PS team documents what the customer requirements are to include what performance levels they expect, how resilient the supporting hardware for the Simpana software needs to be and what the customer's expectations are for problem resolution.

The PS team works with the customer account from build-out to deployment to ongoing management of the software. This becomes very important as the Technical Support team is subsequently brought into contact with the customer. The CommVault PS team shares the history of the customer environment with the Technical Support team to help the customer avoid any long term issues with CommVault. We want to avoid scenarios where we need to drop an engineer off at a customer site and then expect the engineer to fix the customer's problems. By having a history in place, if a CommVault engineer does need to get involved, the engineer already has a sense of what has occurred at that client account and how to best support it.