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.

Integrating Silos of Code is Not Easy

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

The beauty of having a single platform is that integrating with cloud storage is a single process that unifies backup, recovery, archive, deduplication and encryption capabilities that all work with the cloud. In February, CommVault announced the capability of Simpana® backup and archive integration with cloud storage – completely compatible with deduplication from the customer premises all the way to the cloud.

Fortunately for CommVault customers, Simpana software was not created from a bunch of acquired products that were never meant to work together. As an example, take a look at Symantec's recent announcement of the NetBackup™ 5000 appliance. While delivering a pre-packaged data management offering to the market makes sense, the integration of their technology still needs some work as can be seen by comparing this to the newly announced Dell PowerVault DL2200 solution:

Given the fact that NetBackup, PureDisk and EnterpriseVault were each separate companies (i.e. code stacks), you start to understand why it takes so long to integrate each of these products with cloud storage API's. As a result you end up with inhibitors like:

No Deduplication to Cloud

While having NetBackup integration with cloud storage is nice, it is a hard sell without the ability to maintain deduplication from the NetBackup 5000 across the WAN and into cloud storage. If you are interested in why this is an issue, take a look at the below estimated transfer rates for the given pipe size.

Table 1: Estimated backup transfer times to cloud storage

Now let's consider a hypothetical example to illustrate the impact of moving and storing non-deduplicated data into the cloud:

• Full Backup Size = 10TB
• Retention Period = 8 weeks
• Daily Change Rate = .5%
• Pipe Size = T3

What you can see in the below chart is that without deduplication, NetBackup would need to push ~5TB into the cloud every week (assuming compression reduces the full 10TB backup down to 5TB). With CommVault's deduplication, you are only left moving ~300GB for your full backup (after the initial full has been uploaded to the cloud). Over the course of eight weeks, you will have moved and stored over 5x more data without the benefit of deduplication:

Now think about how long it takes you to actually move EACH one of these weekly full backup copies into the cloud (assuming the T3 transfer rates above):

And how much it costs to store data that has not been deduplicated (assuming .25 cents per GB per month):

No Archiving to Cloud

Given the above transfer times, the use case that actually is becoming more prevalent at the moment is archiving to cloud, which EnterpriseVault does not yet support natively. Leveraging user-defined policies, CommVault Simpana agents scan primary storage to stub and remove infrequently accessed data to lower-cost cloud storage. Benefits include making backups more efficient and creating space on more costly, on-premises storage. By its very nature, archive data does not change much, nor is it frequently accessed, making it ideal content for cloud retention.

All in all, Dell's recent refresh of the DL2200 – nearly twice as fast as its predecessor and with cloud integration, is a compelling solution for those users looking to solve on premises data protection of virtual & physical servers with the ability to:

• Archive to Cloud
• Backup to Cloud
• Implement Cloud DR

Symantec, NetBackup and PureDisk are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Dell and Dell PowerVault are trademarks or registered trademarks of Dell, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries.

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