Greg White is a Senior Manager of Product Marketing, focusing on Data Management and Protection. He has worked in in the technology industry in brand and product marketing for the last decade helping organizations of all sizes, verticals and geographies solve their IT challenges. Over the last six years, Greg has gained specific knowledge and experience in the enterprise application and storage areas where he has helped businesses find solutions for their data growth, data management, and data protection problems.

Jeff Dorr is a Senior Manager currently focused on data protection product marketing for CommVault. Over the past 10 years, Jeff has led efforts in several companies to develop, introduce, and manage market leading hardware, software, and services that really help users improve their data protection environment.

SharePoint Protection: It's More than Just Backup

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

By Jeff Dorr

By many accounts, the SharePoint platform is one of the fastest growing products in the Microsoft portfolio. SharePoint 2010 is outpacing 2007 deployments according to a recently published OpenText survey. In this survey, 49 percent of survey respondents indicated that their company now uses SharePoint 2010 as the primary deployment, while only 43 percent are using SharePoint 2007. These same respondents also listed backup as the number two add-on package or system that is being used or is planning to be used with their SharePoint implementation. Archiving was number six, with 18 percent stating archiving was in use or in the planning stages.

I hear a similar theme from the field here at CommVault; SharePoint 2010 deployments are smoking hot. The field has also been telling me that a solid percentage of SharePoint administrators are still developing their data management strategy. Most are concentrating on the basics, like protection and granular, document-level recovery. However, a number of forward-looking IT shops are also evaluating how long term retention of SharePoint data will impact their budgets and their businesses. They need to reclaim production storage space, improve backup windows, and retain data more intelligently. They want an archive solution for their SharePoint environments, but they seem to put archiving down on that list of things to do "next year."

So what's a shrewd admin to do if they need to efficiently manage a 2 to 3 TB SharePoint environment? My admittedly biased opinion is to deploy the CommVault Application Data Management bundle through one of our authorized resellers. The bundle includes capacity based licensing for Simpana 9 backup and archive software. The neat thing with this bundle is that admins can address both their short term protection needs and their need for efficient, economical long term retention with a single, truly integrated platform.

But will a bundle like this be enough to motivate companies to actually implement archiving capabilities? Or will they be more likely to forgo the benefits of intelligent archiving and postpone implementation until "next year?" What should data management specialists like CommVault and our resellers/partners do to stimulate adoption of archiving? Let me know what you think about this topic. We want to hear your opinion.

Jeff Dorr is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at CommVault.

Submit a Comment

Please note that your comments will be sent directly to the author of this blog, and will be published upon approval per CommVault's comment policy.

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.