IT Hosting Rackspace Standardizes on CommVault Simpana

CommVault announced that Rackspace, a specialist in the IT hosting market delivering enterprise-level managed services to businesses of all sizes and kinds around the world, has reported increased efficiency and reliability of its IT operations and added to the number of data management services available to its customer base by using CommVault Simpana software. Committed to providing high levels of data availability to its customers, Rackspace selected CommVault software based on its single management and reporting interface, full-featured capabilities, scalable architecture, and ability to support and centrally manage the heterogeneous data and applications of Rackspace’s distributed customer base.

Rackspace hosts the IT infrastructure for more than 16,000 customers, ranging from large enterprises to SMBs. Because its customers depend on 24/7 data protection, Rackspace turned to CommVault Galaxy Data Protection software to help protect against application downtime and data loss, as well as provide the scalability to support several thousand backup clients without adding layers of operational complexity.

"When making the decision to switch to CommVault, we estimated we would see a 50 percent time savings in configuring complex customer applications for backup with CommVault as compared to other backup software we were using," said Shannon Ward, Senior Product Engineer, Rackspace. "Because of CommVault’s singular approach to data management, we’ve been able to significantly reduce the level of complexity in our data centers, while also increasing the accessibility of mission critical applications, such as our customer’s Oracle databases. Overall, CommVault software has reduced the number of hours required to manage our environment, improved reliability and service levels to our customers and reduced the cost of protecting our customer’s IT infrastructures."

By switching to CommVault software, Rackspace was able to replace five point products with Simpana software to build a single data protection platform and thereby streamline administration and reporting to better serve its customers. According to Rackspace, some tasks such as software updates are now completed in approximately half of the time taken previously. With one interface that unifies the administration and reporting for CommVault’s entire software suite, Rackspace has reduced its overall administrative effort, helping free up IT personnel to focus on more strategic tasks and help customers. On the back-end, one central database delivers consolidated reporting information for sharing with customers to quickly and easily demonstrate what they are backing up.

Using CommVault software, Rackspace will also be able to offer other information management services beyond traditional data backup. For example, customers needing to deal with regulations in the payment card industry often require extra security of encrypting backup data before moving it offsite. Rackspace is now able to customize and deliver solutions to these customers based on the encryption features within the CommVault Simpana suite, without adding layers of management complexity.

"Maintaining a data center environment that ensures continuous availability of data while simultaneously offering the highest level of data protection is not an easy task," said David West, CommVault’s vice president of worldwide marketing and business development. "In today’s cost conscience business world, administrators continuously struggle to strike a balance between controlling IT expenditures and meeting service level agreements. Using CommVault, Rackspace can help ensure that customers experience reliable access to data, and also align IT with the evolving business needs of the enterprise."

In addition to protecting its customers’ IT infrastructure, Rackspace also relies on the data management capabilities of CommVault software to help protect its own IT systems. Rackspace began deploying CommVault in January 2007.

Rackspace

CommVault