David West has served as our Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development since April 2011. Prior to his current role, he served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development from September 2005 to March 2011, and as our vice president of business development from August 2000 to September 2005.

Prior to joining our company, Mr. West served as a director of strategic alliances from April 1999 to July 2000 and vice president of storage solutions in July 2000 at Legato Systems, Inc., which was subsequently acquired by EMC Corporation.

Prior to joining Legato Systems, Mr. West served as vice president of sales at Intelliguard Software, Inc., which was also subsequently acquired by EMC Corporation, from 1990 to April 1999.

Mr. West obtained his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University.

VMworld 2011: Protecting Virtual Servers in the Real World

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

In preparation for our trip to this year's VMworld conference here in Las Vegas – yes, we made it despite Hurricane Irene's best efforts to throw a wrench into our plans – CommVault conducted its annual end user virtualization survey to gauge how our customers are managing virtual environments and how virtual server technologies are affecting their data protection strategies.

It's no surprise that the adoption of server virtualization technology is continuing to accelerate as enterprise organizations consolidate critical applications on VMs. It's a technology trend that cries out for a modern approach to data management. The findings of our survey only reinforce CommVault's belief that there is a data protection gap in the virtual server world.

According to our survey, the adoption rate of server virtualization continues to accelerate year on year with 34 percent of the 388 survey respondents stating their server environments were 75 percent - 100 percent virtualized. The survey also indicates groundswell of support for running business-critical applications on virtual machines in their production environment, including application servers (93%), Web servers (84%), databases (72%) and messaging applications (53%).

The benefits of server virtualization bring with them a series of concerns. According to those polled, the three most cited primary concerns surrounding the deployment of data protection solutions in virtual server environments were cost, ineffective backups and lengthy and complex restore processes.

CommVault is dedicated to help its customers overcome data management challenges and we have succeeded in helping them transform their IT environments to become more efficient, secure, and cost-effective virtualized data centers. This year at VMworld, we invited two of our customers to share their stories with us at our "Customers on CommVault" booth presentations – two special sessions where our customers shared their experiences with CommVault's Simpana software and discussed best practices for protecting virtual server environments.

Dave West Discusses the Results of CommVault's Annual Virtualization Survey

On Tuesday, we were joined in our booth by Paul Slager, director of IT at LWG Consulting, a global company focused on delivering certainty to its insurance industry clients when they need it most – when equipment, systems, structures or data have been threatened by catastrophe or litigation.

Below is a brief overview of how LWG Consulting and CommVault combined forces to take business continuity to the next level and to transform LWG into a 99-percent virtualized data center.

The Challenge

LWG Consulting approached CommVault when the company was faced with challenges that their previous storage deduplication and backup solution was not able to handle. LWG was experiencing:

• Aggressive data growth of about 1 TB each week and a full backup that could take up to two months
• Backup challenges exacerbated by potential WAN problems
• Continuous database corruptions encountered with Symantec deduplication and compression capabilities that led to lost backups and cased excessive administration
• Increased business continuity efforts and need for a platform with more robust disaster recovery functionality to meet RTO/RPO goals

The Solution

CommVault Simpana software Backup and Recovery, Deduplication and Replication

The Results

Using CommVault Simpana software, LWG experienced;

• A reduction in its backup footprint and an increase in storage space savings by over 90 percent
• Compression ratios of 79 percent which also helped reduce the backup window; full backups of 100 TBs, which once took two months to complete were performed in two hours
• Easier and more efficient application restores enabling LWG to recover individual emails, RSS feeds and LinkedIn contacts from Microsoft Exchange 2010 message restores
• Successful backups of both physical and virtual machines from one platform
• An estimated $1 million in bottom line cost savings when compared to products that would have locked LWG into additional, expensive and proprietary hardware

The Future

LWG plans to expand its Simpana software footprint with a full deployment of the archiving module to reclaim even more space on primary storage while reducing the data that needs to be backed up daily.

"CommVault Simpana software is the clear winner for us in terms of functionality, cost and customer support," said Slager. "We're nine months ahead of our initial ROI projection, mostly due to the great results we're seeing. On top of that, CommVault's customer support is probably the best I have ever experienced with any product. Our CEO is also very pleased with our progress as CommVault meets our business needs and allows us all to breathe a bit easier knowing our data is fully protected."

We were also joined by representatives from Richardson International, Canada's largest, privately owned agribusiness, serving the Canadian and international agriculture and food sectors for more than 150 years by handling and merchandizing all major Canadian-grown grains and oilseed products.

Richardson International was able to cultivate modern data management and virtual server protection practices with CommVault Simpana software.

The Challenge

Richardson International came to CommVault when its current data management solution had become cumbersome and tedious to keep up with, especially as the company, led by its 52-person IT department including 30 software developers and supporting 1,750 employees, migrated toward its 100-percent virtualized environment. At the time, Richardson was dealing with;

• Operational inefficiencies created by unreliable backup and recovery of complete virtualized environment
• Administrative strain exacerbated by separate point products for virtual server protection, remote tape backups, desktop/laptop protection and DR
• Additional performance problems caused by unreliable deduplication
• One full-time staffer required to babysit the faulty process

The Solution

CommVault Simpana software Backup and Recovery, Deduplication and Virtual Server Agents

The Results

Using CommVault's Simpana software, Richardson was able to;

• Improve support for virtualized environment due to tight integration with VMware and ability to leverage vStorage API for data protection
• Gain the ability to perform local and centralized backup/restores that enable the elimination of two point products in favor of Simpana software; and the potential elimination of a third product with the addition of desktop laptop support
• Enable its team to focus on solutions rather than get caught up in costing models thanks to capacity licensing model
• Free approximately one full-time staffer for lowered costs, increased efficiencies, and streamlined administration
• Establish a projected nine-month ROI ,especially as the company seeks ways to leverage other capabilities provided by CommVault's unified approach to data protection

The Future

Richardson is currently considering additional ways to leverage Simpana software's full scope of capabilities, including data protection for the company's desktops and laptops as well as file archiving to better balance long-term retention needs with lowering costs to manage primary data.

"With CommVault Simpana software, we've been able to migrate off three disparate point products and consolidate all our data protection requirements on a singular platform that deliver end-to-end protection of our entire environment," said Assistant Vice President of Technical Services, Management Information Services Paul Beaudry. "The result is a more efficient, interoperable and easier method for managing and protecting vital data."

These are just a couple of examples of how CommVault is helping customers bridge the data protection gap between the physical and virtual worlds. We would like to know how server virtualization is affecting your data protection strategy. Tell us your real world CommVault success story by contacting us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

David West is Senior Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, for CommVault.

Submit a Comment

Please note that your comments will be sent directly to the author of this blog, and will be published upon approval per CommVault's comment policy.

The content of this blog reflects the thoughts and opinions of the author, and does not represent the thoughts, opinions, plans or strategies of CommVault Systems, Inc. ("CommVault") and CommVault undertakes no obligation to update, correct or modify any statements made by the author of this blog. Any and all third party links provided by this blog are not affiliated with, nor endorsed by, CommVault.