What do you want to hear from CommVault at VMworld?

Friday, August 13, 2010

Guest post by Axel Streichardt

In preparation for VMworld and CommVault's gold sponsorship (Visit us at the booth #307), I am thinking about the major pain points companies running VMware and other virtualization environments have in the areas of data management, backup and recovery, archiving, cloud computing, and eDiscovery.

Data is growing at exponential rates. The ever-increasing amount of data is necessary for a company to run an efficient business in a more competitive global economy, keep its costs under control, and stay compliant, all at the same time. Nevertheless, the time needed to protect and manage all of this data and information in order to maintain SLAs, RTOs (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is not growing at all. In fact, the window to backup vital data and information without disrupting the business shrinks constantly.

Many companies now are consolidating their virtual infrastructures and improving processes associated with managing it. Specifically, business applications and processes are moving from physical to virtual environments. But despite all of its advantages, such as increasing the utilization of hardware resources, increasing energy efficiency and moving towards cloud computing, virtualization comes with a price: more complexity, tougher manageability, scalability issues and higher costs. The rush toward virtualization also creates a data management challenge.

When asking customers about this challenge at past VMUG (VMware User Group) events, I often get the answer, "that's not my business, I am just responsible for the ERP system" or "I hope we have our virtual infrastructure protected, but I am not sure".

This is scary, and I hope these companies will not get into a situation where they have to rely on data, database and application consistency, or files and information in virtual environments without having assurance that their data is managed well.

Now how can CommVault help customers with its Simpana unified data management and protection software platform?

1. Hardware-based snapshot protection for very fast backups (100s of VMs in minutes): It does this with optimized manageability and granular recovery of enterprise applications; database consistency for business continuity; and the advantage of having all the data, files and content in VMs indexed for easy, automated and fast recovery. Your data protection and management scales at the same time that your virtual infrastructure grows and matures.

2. Auto-discovery functionality to manage the VM sprawl: New VMs are automatically discovered and assigned to backup policies that will guarantee full data protection of all VMs without admin intervention.

3. Full VADP support: small and medium virtual environments can take advantage of VMware's API for data protection.

4. Deduplication (source and target side): This is built into the common platform for faster and more efficient data movement without additional and disruptive software or hardware deployment and integration.

5. One pane of glass for all data management needs: One easy to use, RBAC-based user interface and comprehensive built-in reporting.

These items represent some of things that we plan to tell VMworld attendees about during the show. At the same time, we want to have conversation with you at the event, so we want to hear from you what you'd like to discuss with us. We also would like to get this input in a community-based open forum. Starting today, we'd like to invite you to use Twitter to tell us what you want to learn from CommVault. If you do, you'll be eligible to win an Apple iPad*device, which you can pick up in CommVault's booth (#307) at the end of day 2 of the show. Here are the rules and eligibility requirements:

1. Follow CommVault on Twitter (http://twitter.com/CommVault)
2. Post a tweet with "@CommVault" in post telling us what you want to learn about Simpana software
3. Include the hashtag #SimpanaVM in your tweet
4. Only one entry per person. One win per person.
5. The contest ends August 26, 2010. We will randomly select the winner from all the eligible tweets submitted as outlined above. To see all of the contest rules, click here.
6. We will contact the winner via Twitter direct message with instructions to pick up the new iPad at CommVault's booth at end of the day on Tuesday, August 31.

Visit us at VMworld at the booth (#307) to see all of this in action. Talk with experts and our customers to understand why more and more customers choose and trust CommVault with their virtual, physical and cloud environment.

* Apple and Apple iPad are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Apple. Apple is not a participating partner or sponsor in this offer.

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What Private File Tiering Means to You

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Today a key CommVault OEM partner, Hitachi Data Systems, announced their plans to deliver private and public cloud solutions to enable their customers to adopt cloud technology on a pay-per-use basis. HDS customers now have the ability to combine three key components to tackle unstructured file growth:

1. Intelligent Data Management Software from the Hitachi Data Protection Suite (powered by CommVault)
2. A massively scalable object store through the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP)
3. Avoidance of additional capital expense

As we all know, trying to keep up with unstructured data (aka file and email) growth is a huge issue. In my last post, I defined private cloud as server and/or storage that are contained on the customer's premises or within a dedicated facility at a service provider. When cloud storage is involved, that usually means a highly scalable object store is under the covers that is accessed through CIFS, NFS or REST (as covered in our last blog, CommVault has the ability to leverage all three interfaces to write backup and archive data). The concept of object stores is popular right now as they are often seen as a lower cost highly scalable and expandable storage repository for data that does not frequently change, is unimportant or has not been accessed for a while. This is exactly the type of data you do not want sitting around on your higher-cost NAS or SAN device that is meant to deliver higher performance for the end user.

You might be asking, what makes object stores lower cost? Typically it boils down to:

1. Lower-cost hardware since high performance disk is not critical.
2. Lower management costs since an object store can typically handle many more files than a traditional file system, with less management requirements.
3. Multi-tenant capability to enable higher utilization of storage.

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A Clearing in the Clouds

Friday, June 25, 2010

Welcome to the inaugural CommVault blog on a subject that is on everyone's radar today: cloud computing. In true fashion for our industry, we have added more complexity to a buzz word that no amount of PowerPoint slides or white boards can suffice to explain. With this blog, I intend to succinctly communicate our perspective on how the migration to cloud computing will impact data and information management in the coming months and years and how CommVault Simpana software is an enabler.

Laying out the playing field
As many of you undoubtedly know, the term 'cloud' encompasses many concepts so it is natural to start with how we categorize cloud technology. In general, we see three primary categories: Platform as a Service, Compute as a Service and Storage as a Service.

Defining Cloud

Multi-tenant architecture, self-service, pay as you go

User rents a platform to build, develop and deploy web applications	User rents "servers" to load and run their applications in the cloud	User rents "storage" to deposit and retain data

For the purposes of this blog, most of my focus will be contained within the 'compute as a service' and 'storage as a service' categories. To complicate things even more, both of these can further be segmented into 'private' or 'public' architectures depending on the end-user use case.

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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.