Virtual Infrastructure Reference Architecture with Optimized Data Protection: CommVault, NetApp and VMware

Friday, April 27, 2012

Guest post by Phil Curran

The team here at CommVault is winding up a really cool little project with our friends at NetApp on a new scalable Virtual Infrastructure reference architecture and I want to take a minute to share a couple of the details on the power of this solution. This virtual infrastructure architecture represents a joint CommVault, NetApp and VMware solution that leverages NetApp SnapProtect^® snapshot management technology to deliver optimized data protection for customers and partners looking to quickly build out "IT as a Service" delivery models.

Virtual Infrastructure reference architectures have been available for some time from a number of vendors — NetApp included. The benefits of the approach make a ton of sense and can be really helpful if you're an organization looking to build out an environment with thousands of VMs. These unified architectures do a great job at defining an optimized solution for servers, storage, networking and virtualization platforms and really simplifies and accelerates the process of rolling out large-scale virtual deployments. The idea of accelerating a large scale virtualization project by leveraging an underlying infrastructure that is well-orchestrated, pre-defined, and pre-tested is compelling to say the least.

We're working with quite a few organizations looking to leverage these types of reference architectures to build out shared services infrastructures and deliver IT as a Service. However, most reference architectures today lack a data protection solution that has been optimized for that type of environment. The trouble is, most existing data protection solutions are just not ready for the demands of virtual infrastructure that is intended to support a private or hybrid cloud initiative.

So CommVault and NetApp are stepping in with a joint solution designed to address the unique data protection challenges of virtual infrastructures to allow our mutual customers to more rapidly accelerate the rollout of both virtual infrastructure. Specifically, we've developed some amazing capabilities uniquely suited for the shared service infrastructure with respect to:

1. Scale — By leveraging SnapProtect^® technology, the joint solution has the ability to protect 500 VMs in less than 30 minutes and scale to protect thousands and virtual machines across the infrastructure.

Meet the application SLAs —Think about the applications you are likely to run in this new shared services model. Here's a hint: we're not talking file/print services! So data protection becomes critical as these applications have very tight SLA requirements for recovery points and recovery times in order to support near-zero downtime requirements. When a restore or recovery is required with these applications, we're talking recovery points of a few hours or less and restore times on the order of minutes. The joint solution is designed to accomplish just this level of application awareness and integration to ensure that you can deliver both protection and recovery SLAs as you virtualize business applications

CommVault and NetApp are stepping in to fill the gap in data protection offerings for these scalable Virtual Infrastructures with SnapProtect^® technology for Virtual Servers. To this end, we're wrapping up a pretty significant joint effort to define a Virtual Infrastructure reference architecture that includes not only the usual suspects needed — servers, networking, storage and virtualization — but the data protection and data management components to go along with it. And we've validated the configurations with some extensive engineering testing to provide a real-world characterization of the performance and predictability of this reference architecture.

If you are interested in learning more about the Virtual Infrastructure Building Blocks, download a full whitepaper on the architecture.

Phil Curran is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for Virtualization with CommVault.

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Cloud Providers Offer Businesses a Way to Offload Edge Data to the Cloud

Monday, April 09, 2012

Guest post by Jeanna James

I think that one of the most interesting things about my role at CommVault is that I have the opportunity to work with an exciting variety of cloud companies and can see first-hand all of the new ways they are solving problems. CommVault cloud providers are constantly tackling new markets and one of the hottest trends we are seeing is in the need to protect laptops and desktops for businesses. I've had several companies come to me this year with thousands of users and 100+TB of data to protect. And while they want to protect the data, they don't want to manage it themselves. Often "edge data" goes unprotected and companies just don't have the staff to deal with it internally. The cloud is a perfect fit for non-critical data as it offers a new tier of low-cost storage wrapped with range of data management services.

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CommVault Turns On Software Self-Service for the Cloud

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Guest post by Jeanna James

For those of you who have been running CommVault in a multi-tenant environment, you know that we've made many enhancements over the past five years to specifically address the needs of cloud providers. The latest release of Simpana^® software is no exception. We've been working hard with product management and development to create an easy-to-use portal and API set. Cloud providers want to offer its clients some self-service tasks but don't want to administer many lines of command line code to do it. Now, with CommVault's web console, it's easy to skin the console and make it available as a standalone portal or leverage the API set and integrate it into your own portal.

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vCenter Plug-in for Simpana Software: How to Dramatically Simplify and Accelerate VMware Restores

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Guest post by Phil Curran

Our SolveForward 2012 virtual trade show has been a huge success for CommVault. So far, we've had tons of visitors come through the virtual event to chat with our experts about all the new Simpana software capabilities. One of the new features generating a lot of interest is the new vCenter Plug-in for Simpana 9. More than one person swung by the virtualization booth and said "I didn't even know this was possible!" and "This looks like it could save me a bunch of time."

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vForum Success in Sydney and Singapore for CommVault

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Guest post by Gerry Sillars, Vice President, CommVault Asia Pacific & Japan

It has been a busy period for the CommVault team across the Asia-Pacific and Japan region, with participation in both vForum events in Sydney and Singapore, as well the VSS event series in the ASEAN region.

CommVault has been a committed partner of the VMware events across the region for several years, but the 2011 events were some of the most successful to date. The VMware showpiece in Sydney set a new standard both in terms of the number and calibre of attendees, with over 550 visiting the CommVault booth during the show. In Singapore, that figure rose to over 600.

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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.