As the Senior Director of Product Marketing and Business Development Jeff is focused on building CommVault's cloud solutions and partner ecosystem to extend customer value using Simpana software.

Prior to joining CommVault, Jeff spent six years at Dell where he worked in a variety of roles including outbound marketing, PowerVault product management and analyst relations.

Jeff has his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.

Affordable Cloud DR is Here

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

While many CommVault users have been interested in cloud storage as a low-cost, long term repository for backup & archive data, the more interesting topic is what can be done to the data once it gets to the cloud. By far, the most frequent user request centers on disaster recovery (DR). This week, CommVault and Rackspace announced 'Cloud DR', an affordable solution that combines enterprise class data management software with on-demand cloud infrastructure.

Traditional DR is unaffordable for small and medium sized businesses because it typically means buying duplicate hardware infrastructure that is then hosted and/or managed within a service provider's facility. High price tags usually prevent the mid-market from implementing this type of DR solution, which defaults back to sending backup copies to tape for offsite storage in the event of a disaster. While this is an affordable alternative, tape management is complicated and the recovery time is typically measured in days.

Enter CommVault and Rackspace. This same tape-based customer now can replace the tape tier with Cloud Files - a cloud storage tier that can eliminate tape related capital expense with a pay-as-you-go operational expense. This also can free tape related headcount for more strategic projects within the organization.

While these are not new benefits to cloud storage, Rackspace has the added benefit of delivering Cloud Servers that can access backup data residing in Cloud Files. This means, in the event of a disaster, CommVault customers can recover backup data into a Cloud Server – eliminating the need to bring backup data back across the WAN.

After restoring the appropriate backup data into each Cloud Server, end users then can be re-routed to the new Cloud Servers, delivering the following benefits:

1. Much faster recovery times. Cloud DR typically will enable recovery within hours instead of days since administrators are not left waiting for tapes to come back while they scramble to find hardware to which to recover to.
2. Much lower infrastructure costs. As these are Cloud Servers, you pay for them when you need them. Once your original site has recovered from the disaster, you can eliminate the cloud servers to stop paying for them.
3. The entire backup and recovery workflow is managed from a single pane of glass - CommVault's CommCell console. End-user policies automate what data and when it moves into Cloud Files, greatly reducing the complexity of keeping track of data and getting it back when you need it.

With Rackspace Cloud Files starting at $0.15 per GB per month and Cloud Servers starting at $11 per server per month, this appears to have market disrupting potential. What do you think?

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