Please find below highlights of, and links to blogging websites that have commented on CommVault and its products. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do 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. If you click on a link and it appears to be no longer valid, please let the webmaster know.

CommVault, a New Jersey-based customer data management firm, recently conducted a benchmark survey of its contact center support services and achieved a 97% customer satisfaction rating, far above the rates similar sized organizations score, according to the Help Desk Institute benchmarks.

Robert Brower, CommVault's vice president of global customer support and services, discussed his company's approach to technical support via contact centers distributed across the world and how it measures its customer service.

In this 16-minute podcast, Brower describes:

• What method CommVault uses to measure customer satisfaction and what metrics it tracks
• How customer satisfaction plays into the company's growth plans
• The software used in CommVault's support and service infrastructure
• How CommVault runs a distributed support environment that has taken closure and response times and cut them by 300% in some geographies.

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CommVault CEO Bob Hammer says his customers can't get enough of data deduplication, and the vendor will give them a lot more of it when its next version of Simpana launches later this year.

During CommVault's earnings call Tuesday, Hammer said deduplication was the major driver in the company's 31% revenue growth last quarter. With Simpana 9, he said, CommVault will increase the scale and functionality of its deduplication while integrating source and target dedupe capability. Hammer says CommVault's dedupe will go beyond anything on the market, "and there will be no close second."

I spoke with Hammer after the call, and he clarified a bit.

"This will be our third-generation of deduplication, and we will dramatically increase the scale with the addition of source-side dedupe and the ability to deduplicate secondary copies and dedue directly to the cloud," Hammer said. "Those are the major areas we'll expand."

Hammer says the expanded dedupe in Simpana 9 will take it closer to primary data.

"With source-side deduplication, you're getting close to that primary layer," he said. "We're combining that deduplication with the ability to more intelligently manage snap copies across hardware silos. It's not primary dedupe, but it's close to the primary layer. We're working with a number of hardware vendors that will be part of our release in the fall as well."

Hammer also says Simpana 9 will deduplicate "virtualization environments across the board – at the source and in some cases at the target, but we don't want to dedupe just at the target. It becomes an integrated seamless part of all tiers of storage, including the cloud and tape."

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CommVault has just signed a strategic distribution agreement through Avnet Technology Solutions. Here's a look at the relationship and the potential implications for Avnet's channel partners.

CommVault's flagship product is Simpana, a software platform that provides backup, replication, archive, search and resource management. It's safe to expect Avnet to connect the dots between its StoragePath focus and CommVault's offerings. And there are clues that CommVault could play a role in Avnet's CloudReady strategy.

Also, Avnet and CommVault seem to be working on a global scale; the duo has existing relationships in place across the UK, Ireland, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia.

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As one of the newest computing frontiers, cloud technology is generating massive interest from organizations seeking substantial economies of scale by outsourcing all or portions of their computing, applications and data storage requirements. It's true that migrating data to an external cloud can lead to sizable savings on capital and operational expenses. There are also, however, a host of potential security and privacy issues that can arise and expose organizations to unique risks.

It's important to take the time upfront to determine the value of the data being placed in an external cloud, along with establishing proper Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and disaster recovery commitments to safeguard the information. Reputable cloud computing vendors should be able to articulate a sound business continuity strategy, which encompasses proven and audited data protection processes for minimizing downtime should an outage occur.

Ensuring data privacy also becomes more complicated in the cloud as data must be protected against unwanted access by the provider as well as the provider's other customers or outside intruders. As a result, companies should consider keeping highly sensitive data in-house, especially if the information contains sensitive customer data, trade secrets, or could be subject to legal privilege.

The issue of access can be unclear in cloud computing because a third party has actual possession of, and can control access to, an organization's data. Unlike traditional outsourcing models, where customer data is segregated and housed on separate devices, multi-tenant cloud computing environments co-mingle information from different organizations.

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CommVault was one of the first enterprise back-up software vendors to integrate deduplication into their product offering. While it wasn't a surprise that they did this, it was a surprise that they were able to add the ability to deduplicate to tape. In my most recent regular blog post on Network Computing, I covered the trend to deduplicate on media other than traditional disk-based systems. CommVault's hybrid approach is a unique compared to how others perform deduplication, and worth examining.

Traditionally deduplication is done in just one area of the backup tier, either at the client, at the backup server (called a "media agent" in a CommVault environment) or on the backup storage target. While some vendors will allow you to choose where to deduplicate data from among these three locations, the workload for that deduplication is only done on the tier you select. CommVault uses a more hybrid approach. At the client they have always segmented the data to be backed-up into blocks, and they have had the ability to compress that block prior to sending. Now with deduplication, they add one more step, executing the algorithm to generate the hash code needed for deduplication. This offloads the creation of hashes from the back-up or media server. Unlike source side deduplication products, however, the CommVault agent does not perform a look-up to see if the block already exists on the backup server. The block is sent with its hash. The backup or media server performs the deduplication look-up as it receives the block.

By distributing the workload across the back-up tiers, CommVault feels that they alleviate the performance concerns of both source-side and target-side deduplication methods. Although the respective providers of those solutions will debate the point, source-side deduplication may impact performance of the client while performing the look-up for redundant data, and target-side deduplication can become a bottleneck when receiving that data. CommVault potentially gets around the problem by spreading the load throughout the back-up tier. For clients where even the five percent load of creating hashes is too much impact, there is an option to have the media server create the hash, but of course that increase in the performance requirements would need to be accounted for before configuring hash creation on the media agent(s).

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I've always been a HUGE fan of Commvault. They just rock. When I was a Systems Engineer back in Austin in the early 2000's, I don't think we had an account that I didn't take Commvault into to try and solve a customer's backup issues. AND WE DIDN'T EVEN SELL COMMVAULT !!! They had such cool technology that was clearly leaps and bounds above everyone else. Not to mention, they had some really cool people that worked for them as well (Shout out to Jeanna, Joelle, RobK and of course Mr Cowgil).

Fast forward a few years and the release of Simpana as well as the addition of native DeDuplication clearly gave Data Domain and various other deduplication solutions a run for their money. You would think that would be enough for one company!! I was pretty excited about their recent press release around adding cloud data storage as a tier option in Simpana. Dave Raffo over at SearchDataBackup.Com did a really nice job of summarizing the announcement. It's a clear sign that Commvault is still very much an engineering driven organization. Which is just AWESOME!!

I think the biggest nugget that I pulled out of the press release is Commvault's ability to integrate native REST capabilities. The more and more I hear about REST's potential, the more I get excited about some of the endless possibilities it can offer. In this case, it allowed Commvault to easily integrate their backup architecture to include 3rd party cloud solutions like Amazon S3, EMC Atmos and a slew of others. They didn't need to build an API for each vendor; they just relied on REST's open API to do that for them.

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Everybody wants to go to heaven someday, but nobody seems to want to go now. Why so? Perhaps it's mere uncertainty. If we substitute the cloud for "heaven," the same seems to be true today. That is why it is so important for vendors to create products and services that can actually get clients to the cloud today while still keeping their feet on the ground. With that in mind, CommVault's ability to effectively extend its data management platform into the cloud provides a positive illustration that the cloud can provide real value today and not just someday. Such examples are important so that the cloud is not just dismissed as hype.

CommVault is a profitable, publicly traded, worldwide software company with annual revenues in the $250 million range, all accomplishments for which a single product platform company can be proud. Now that it seems to have navigated through the hazardous economic shoals of over a year respectively, CommVault, along with numerous other companies, are seeking new business opportunities.

A recent CommVault survey on the cloud revealed the challenge facing vendors. Only five percent of the respondents said that they currently utilize at least some cloud storage today, and only six percent more plan to do so in the next 12 months. Another 41 percent professed consideration of the use of cloud services in the future although they are not sure when. For them, "cloud heaven" is still not now. And a near majority - 48 percent - still does not plan the use of cloud services at all. So in order to help those who expressed an interest get to the cloud sooner than later, vendors are making their products and services available within the cloud. And CommVault is no exception.

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CommVault added block-level data deduplication to its Simpana data protection and management suite at the start of 2009, and introduced cloud connectivity this week. Now CEO Bob Hammer says there will be even more dedupe and cloud when Simpana 9 launches later this year.

Hammer says dedupe has been a major source of revenue for CommVault with 900 customers licensing the feature in 2009, including around 300 in the fourth quarter as CommVault increased total revenue 18% year over year to $71 million. So what's next for Simpana's dedupe?

"We will take deduplication up a level so it can enable us to manage data in and out of clouds and remote locations in a much more comprehensive way than we do today," Hammer said of CommVault's plans for Simpana 9. "Our objectives are to improve scale, the algorithms and the way we do source site deduplication. It's a pretty significant enhancement to the product line."

Hammer says CommVault is unlikely to seek more OEM partners beyond Dell for its deduplication, and will instead concentrate on picking up more channel distribution partners for Simpana. That's a different strategy than other dedupe vendors such as Quantum and FalconStor, who are trying to capitalize on dedupe demand by offering the software to storage vendors to compete with EMC's Data Domain and Avamar dedupe products.

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It's called the integrated cloud storage connector, but it doesn't make CommVault a storage provider. Rather, it lets users integrate storage with cloud offerings from providers such as Microsoft and Amazon. That sounds pretty useful, actually.

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Today CommVault announced that their Simpana integrated backup and archiving software can now use public cloud providers in addition to local disk and tape as a data store. I hope that CommVault is, as they were with deduplication, leading a new wave of disk-to-disk-to-cloud (D2D2C)backup and archive solutions. While I firmly believe that there's a lot of life left in tape, especially for long retention archives with relatively low access rates, 25 years of consulting to organizations has taught me that tape drives, like backhoes and other heavy equipment, should be left to trained professionals. Small and even mid-size organizations rarely handle tape properly, leaving them exposed to data loss.

Even those mid-size organizations that understand the importance of sending backups off-site for disaster recovery purposes frequently have a courier from Recall or Iron Mountain pickup a set of tapes only once a week. Should they have to recover a major system from a failure on Thursday, restoring from the off-site backup would mean rolling the data back to the previous Friday when that tape was generated, while courier and box storage fees kept adding up. Add in that the tapes are never ready on time, or maybe the backup admin is on vacation or doing an emergency restore, the human factor means it's just not reliable.

With D2D2C, data goes off-site without user intervention, and that a good thing. In Simpana, a cloud provider (Nirvanix, Amason S3 and Microsoft Azure to start) is just like another disk repository, so the backup admin can define jobs to copy data from the local disk backups to the cloud. Simpana's built-in data deduplication minimizes both the WAN traffic and storage space needed, keeping the running cost of the solution to a minimum. Smart users will also encrypt their data in Simpana before sending it out to the cloud, essentially eliminating the security risk. The really paranoid could sign up for S3 and Nirvanix to cover cloud provider outage and failure risks.

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Some interesting data surrounding cloud storage came out this week indicating that, far from being a slam-dunk application, the technology is likely to face a far more nuanced acceptance among IT professionals for the time being.

Forrester reported the results a recent survey of more than 1,200 enterprise executives that showed barely 3 percent use the cloud for general storage purposes. But that's not the worst of it: A startling 43 percent report they are not interested in cloud storage at all, citing such issues as service level guarantees, security and reliability as the main reasons for holding back.

If there is a silver lining for cloud providers here, it's that interest in the cloud as a backup platform is slightly higher, most likely reflecting that such an approach would still house critical data on local storage infrastructure, reserving the cloud for older data or for emergency use.

While the survey may throw cold water on general-purpose storage plans of cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, they can take heart in the rising number of backup and archive solutions that are adding built-in cloud compatibility.

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If your family was like mine, Thanksgiving was a two-tiered affair: The adults sat at the fancy dining room table while the kids had to sit in the kitchen, some even using a card table and folding chairs. You knew you were grown up when you moved up to the adult table. I guess this American coming-of-age ritual is pretty common with other rituals, too. There’s no formal ceremony, but everyone knows when little Johnny becomes just-plain John.

We see similar things happen in IT. New technologies and ideas are often given a pat on the head, a pinch on the cheek, but then sent to the kids table in the kitchen. Only mature technologies are taken seriously and granted equal status when enterprise architectures are defined!

One sure-fire way of determining when a technology is ready for prime time is when it is integrated with a major enterprise product. Sure, lots of products will support this or that, but thoroughly integrating a new technology requires serious effort. Not just any technology gets this kind of focus!

That’s why I’m pleased to see today’s announcement that CommVault has completely integrated API-driven public cloud storage with Simpana, their impressive data protection and archiving suite. It reminds me of that point when the backup products of yore finally adopted disk-based technology. Now there are three equal backup targets: Tape, disk, and cloud.

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In a move that makes it clear that CommVault is not in the cloud business, CommVault announced its intention to enable a cloud-based tier of storage for its Simpana suite of data management solutions. Previously, the company emphasized that it would not follow the lead of others in its segment and offer a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution based on Simpana. Instead, the company arms MSPs with its technology so that they can deliver a SaaS solution. Now, CommVault is enabling a cloud storage tier via partnerships with Amazon (S3), Iron Mountain (Archive Services Platform), Microsoft (Azure), Nirvanix (SDN), and soon EMC (Atmos).

Bravo CommVault. The company has always had flair for doing things differently... and for being aggressive versus the competition. There's no difference here. None of the other enterprise-class backup vendors have provided any direction regarding their cloud tiers for on-premises backup/recovery and archive solutions. Sure, Symantec has its Hosted Services offering (formerly SPN), which delivers a cloud storage tier for Backup Exec, but what about NetBackup? IBM has SaaS and cloud offerings within its BCRS group, but none currently integrate with TSM. And EMC? Well, Atmos should provide cloud capabilities for its Networker and Avamar solutions, but EMC Backup and Recovery Services group is focused on integrating its Data Domain storage tier first.

CommVault is attempting to make the move to a cloud storage tier easy. Simpana has gone through the integration necessary to communicate with other vendors' cloud-based storage ... no "complex scripting or the addition of costly, disparate cloud gateway appliances." This capability is offered at no charge through a one-click upgrade to the latest service pack (although clients still pay CommVault for the capacity of data managed by Simpana). Security and bandwidth concerns are being addressed with encryption, and compression and deduplication, respectively.

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CommVault seems to be a very sociable storage company. It is playing nicely with several hot online storage providers, and with the way cloud storage is growing, this appears to be a very smart move.

The New Jersey-based company announced Feb. 1 that it is shipping a new "cloud connector" for its Simpana storage software, one that enables users to move their on-site backup and archived data into either private or public cloud storage without a lot of coding or the need for a gateway appliance. That was the key first move that enabled all these new partnerships.

The idea, of course, is for CommVault customers to save storage costs. Instead of keeping everything on site, they can move their less-frequently accessed data from more costly tiered spinning disks and tape archives to lower-cost cloud storage accounts. This works for content from Oracle and SAP databases, Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint systems, and virtualized data.

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We have been running Commvault Simpana 8 for 4 months and to be quite honest, it has been flawless and great. As I mentioned before, we were concerned with future growth and what it would cost us for hardware for backups and more importantly, could we actually get backups the way we needed them?!? Well, we nailed everything and then some.

We have had to restore multiple files including Exchange (single message and multiple messages), Exchange store (testing purposes), Server 2008 DC (testing purposes), VMWare virtual server (testing purposes), SQL database, Server 2008 system state (testing purposes) and multiple files on file shares. Every single restore took less than 5 minutes except for the testing recoveries. The testing recovery is part of an on-going plan to prepare for a major project, but it was still rock solid and flawless.

Domain rebuild recovery - We are in the planning process of re-building the entire domain and infrastructure of our company and I have begun the testing of Server 2008 recoveries and disaster recoveries. So far I have tested recovering a 2008 domain controller after deleting multiple users and groups and replicating the change. Easy as pie my friend, everything went into place and the replication took place and the domain was back up and running in minutes. This domain rebuild has allowed me to test for just about every disaster possible and to document exactly every step in the case I get hit by a bus/train and the boss man has to take over for me.

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I recently implemented Commvault version 8 with a company that was running Symantec Backup Exec. The Symantec software was having trouble backing up the Exchange mailboxes (Exchange 2007) and this was a mission critical issue for the executives. The Symantec software was also having a difficult time backing up Server 2008 and Citrix Xen Server. After numerous calls and emails (18 calls and 22 emails) to tech support it was still not resolved. So now the company was missing a massive amount of data and could not get the software to backup to an IP NAS device (Seagate Black Armor). In the end this would have spelled disaster for the IT team and there would have been some very bent employees with a very bad taste in their mouth for the IT staff. I made one suggestion...Commvault. I used it in the past as a stand alone and in conjunction with Exagrid disk storage. I loved it very much and wanted to get it in house ASAP.

First step was getting the management staff on board after showcasing it for the Director of IT/IS. The Director loved it and only had one thing to say. “Prove it in the first month of use and I am sold forever.” The budget was approved and the purchase was made.

Second step was scheduling the fun of turning off Symantec and kick starting Commvault.

It was a warm fall day in 2009 and Myke the Master Geek went to work in his workshop. I started by disabling the Symantec service on all servers and disabling the software on the backup server. Next up, getting my Commvault Media Agent and Commserve on-line and ready to go. The Media Agent was a new Dell R710 loaded with Server 2008 64 bit with a Powervault connected to it. Then we added 2 Seagate Black Armor 4.5TB devices for the disk storage. The Commserve was actually a VMWare virtual server loaded with Server 2003 32 bit. Once the devices were loaded, connected and talking...it was on to deploying the agents on each server to be backed up.

The ultimate goal was to have about 4 weeks of backup data on disk and then a weekly full backup on tape. We had a decent size of data that was backed up daily so we purchased the deduplication license with our Commvault software. This would allow us to deduplicate our data and use less disk space for our backups. With that in mind we expected a disk savings of about 50% to 60%. We were wrong and wrong big time. After running the Commvault backups with deduplication for about 2 months, we were getting a disk savings of 89.88%. We were storing 10.074TB of data on 1.019TB of actual disk space. That was saving us 9.055TB of disk space. We were very excited about this as this gave us a great amount of room for growth and gave us a baseline to look forward to in the future. Needless to say, the Director of IT/IS was very happy.

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CommVault (CVLT) this morning posted better-than-expected results for the fiscal second quarter ended September.

The data storage software company posted revenue for the quarter of $66.7 million and profits of 17 cents a share; the Street had been expecting $62.7 million and 16 cents.

The company did not provide forward guidance in the release.

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It just wouldn't be the storage industry if there weren't technical debates popping up on a daily basis.

One that caught my eye today is an ongoing conversation between some storage bloggers about data deduplication to tape, and whether or not it's a crazy idea. Or, more accurately, whether it's "good crazy" or "bad crazy."

Backup expert W. Curtis Preston got things started with a blog written after he visited CommVault's headquarters in Oceanport, N.J., and discussed the concept of CommVault's data deduplication to tape feature added in Simpana 8. "Dedupe to tape is definitely crazy. But is it crazy good or crazy bad?" Preston wrote.

Everyone (including the CommVault folks) agrees that no one would want to do any significant portion of their restores from deduped tape. But I also agree that if I typically do all my restores from within the last 30 days, and someone asks me for a 31 day-old file, it's generally going to be the type of restore where the fact that it might take several minutes to complete is not going to be a huge deal. (In the case that you did need to do a large restore from a deduped tape set, you could actually bring it back in to disk in its entirety before you initiate the restore.)

Now here's the business case. Anyone who has done consulting in this business for a while has met the customer where everyone knows that 99% of the restores come from the last 30-60 days &ndash and yet they keep their backups for 1-7 years. What a waste of resources. CommVault is saying, "Hey. If you're going to do that, at least dedupe the tapes." They showed me two business cases from two customers that doing this was saving them over $500K per year in their Iron Mountain bill.

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