Gilbane Deploys CommVault Simpana

Gilbane Inc., a privately held family-owned companies in the construction and real estate industry, has deployed CommVault Simpana Backup and Replication software to address its disaster recovery and business continuity needs.

Gilbane has annual revenues topping $3 billion and employs more than 2,100 people in 30 offices nationwide. The company is known for high-profile construction projects, including the Prudential Center, home of the New Jersey Devils’ sports arena, Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, as well as the World War II and Vietnam War Memorials in Washington, D.C.

To support annual email growth of more than 30 percent and gain further benefit from automating core administrative processes and remote office data protection, Gilbane evaluated multiple vendor solutions including Symantec VERITAS NetBackup. The company chose CommVault Simpana Backup and Replication software to protect 14 TBs of production data. CommVault’s solutions offered the ease of use, scalability and functionality necessary to support the construction company’s rapid growth without increasing costs or IT staff. Additionally, CommVault had deep expertise and experience protecting Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange environments.

By leveraging CommVault Simpana software, Gilbane replaced tape-based backup and recovery with online storage to speed operations. They deployed CommVault Replication software to reliably protect their remote office data and enhance their disaster recovery capabilities by:

• Centralizing their remote office backups to the datacenter
• Leveraging essential ‘Application awareness’ for maintaining consistency between production and replicated data;
• Eliminating tape backup in their remote offices
• Continuously protecting data
• Automating protection and recovery
• Using bandwidth throttling to optimize available network resources
• Managing all their data with one trained team

According to Gilbane, the company realized the following benefits:

• Savings of more than 300 hours per year in company-wide data protection management, resulting in a 25 percent increase in strategic IT projects completed each quarter.
• Backups reduced from 24 hours to less than eight; file recoveries reduced from two weeks to less than an hour.
• Near real-time replication assures highest levels of business continuity.
• Seamless integration with Microsoft environment eliminates costs, complexities and inefficiencies of remote data management.
• Point-and-click reporting for monitoring all backups and replication functions.
•  Single platform architecture simplifies data management, to support planned migration to its CommVault Simpana 7.0 Software suite for 64-bit architecture and deployment of CommVault Archive software to address evolving storage management and eDiscovery needs.

"The big draw for CommVault software is its unified architecture, which requires less administrative resources for managing data, and provides a scalable, seamless structure for supporting business needs both now and in the future," said Lance Osojnicki, CTO of Gilbane."Now, our ability to manage our data is completely seamless and transparent," added Osojnicki. "We don’t need to know where restored data resides as CommVault software manages all that data and we just click on what needs to be recovered." "Since moving to CommVault’s scalable data management platform, we have increased our project deliverables by more than 25 percent each year. Simpana Software with Replication lets us take on many strategic initiatives, such as remote access and the delivery of advanced IT services to all locations," concluded Osojnicki.