CommVault Simpana Supporting Physical and Virtual Systems

CommVault continues to meet the growing demands of ever-increasing virtualized environments with new Simpana software product innovations that deliver elevated levels of data protection and application agility while enabling organizations to simplify the management of their infrastructures for efficient IT operations and cost savings.

CommVault Simpana software, with its Universal Virtual Server Agent, delivers customers unique functionality including global, embedded content-aware deduplication; true, block-level image backup; cross-platform data recovery; and Virtual Machine (VM) auto-discovery that extends not only during initial installation but also throughout ongoing deployment of virtual machines.

CommVault leverages its Singular Information Management approach to simplify server virtualization deployment and management by offering the ability to eliminate the need to separately install, configure and manage multiple agents to protect multiple VMs. Collections of VMs can be protected centrally and off-host via a single policy.

With CommVault Simpana software, customers can leverage global, embedded deduplication to dramatically reduce the amount of data residing on both physical and virtual systems. With less data under management, Simpana software can help customers cut costs on server purchases and maintenance, while also lowering administrative overhead, as well as space and energy use.

By also optimizing backup and recovery, as well as archive storage utilization, CommVault helps organizations achieve consistent and reliable data protection to facilitate fast and cost-effective disaster recovery and elevated business continuity.

Simpana 8 Simplifies Server Virtualization
While Addressing Top Customer Priorities
Additional capabilities in Simpana 8 are designed to address top customer priorities for managing server virtualization, including:

• VMotion ‘awareness’ for automatically and transparently tracking the location of a virtual machine, which ensures the continuity of virtual machine protection;
• Cross-platform data recovery–from physical to virtual, virtual to virtual or virtual to physical–restores data volumes regardless of where the data resides;
• Support for Proxy Server and Hot-Add Mode offers greater flexibility by deploying VMware data protection through a separate physical server or existing virtual machine;
• Enhanced throttling enables organizations to fine-tune VMware data protection through configurable parameters that control the number of simultaneous VM backups or time delays between backup initiations to maximize concurrency; and
• Operational efficiency is increased with single-pass backup support with single-step recovery of virtual machines, data volumes or individual files hosted on Microsoft Windows guest operating systems.

Customers Benefit from CommVault’s Commitment
to Protecting Virtualized Environments
David Loor, director of Information Systems, USC Keck School of Medicine, said: "We use CommVault Simpana software to protect approximately 16 TB of data that is primarily Windows virtual and physical servers, as well as applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server. We value Simpana software’s unified architecture, which enables us to administer all data management operations from a single pane of glass. In other words, our administrators don’t have to learn different tools and interfaces for backup and recovery, archiving and in the future, replication and search functions. In addition, from backing up both our physical servers and VMware ESX hosts and using Simpana deduplication software, we’ve reduced our storage footprint by 75 percent, while also eliminating the need for additional hardware appliances."

Frank Delaney, IT Infrastructure manager, Alaska Heart Institute LLC, said: "Alaska Heart Institute runs specialized medical and cardiology applications on virtual machines residing on VMware ESXi servers. Our doctors often access these applications at night, so we have to be diligent about ensuring that backup processes don’t interfere with our ongoing business operations. Transitioning from client-based backup of individual virtual machines to off-host, proxy server backup with CommVault Simpana software and the VMware Consolidated Backup framework helps us mitigate our concerns about impacting virtual server performance, while simplifying licensing and management."

Jon Krueger, IT Operations manager, Associa, said: "CommVault Simpana software has helped simplify the management and protection of our VMware environment. With the Simpana 8 Universal Virtual Server Agent, we easily back up our systems centrally off-host and no longer have to worry about licensing, installing, maintaining and updating client agents on individual virtual machines for backup purposes."

Matt Piccirilli, system administrator, Columbia College Chicago, said: "CommVault software is so much more than just backup. The most compelling benefit for me is recovery reliability. Having used CommVault Simpana software for more than two years, I can boast a 100 percent success rate for data recovery, regardless of whether I’m restoring an Exchange database, an operating system or recovering an individual file or directory into my VMware virtual environment in a single step. We also look forward to leveraging Simpana block-level deduplication to the fullest extent to help us keep more data on disk for even faster recovery."

Lauren Whitehouse, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "While virtual server vendors offer the tools and interfaces to enable more effective data protection, CommVault has taken extra steps to build in features that help simplify management and licensing, accelerate backup and recovery, and reduce storage and bandwidth requirements. This allows IT organizations to deliver better protection service levels while maintaining or lowering costs and administrative overhead. IT organizations implementing–or considering implementing–server virtualization to yield optimization benefits should consider solutions that unify such functionality, like Simpana 8, to fully realize efficiency in data protection processes."

David West, vice president of Marketing and Business Development for CommVault, said: "At CommVault, providing enterprise-class data protection for virtualized environments is a top priority. With Simpana 8 and our Universal Virtual Server Agent, more than 10,000 current customers now gain an innovative foundation that helps ease the challenges of protecting, recovering and retaining data from virtualized environments and delivers market-leading functionality that effectively extends enterprise data management across physical and virtual platforms."