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.

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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