IMG Projects $1 Million in Savings Over 3 Years With CommVault Simpana

IMG, the world’s premier and most diversified sports, entertainment and media company, has deployed CommVault Systems, Inc. Simpana software to ensure high availability of business-critical applications and data that drive a global conglomerate of business-building solutions involving many of the world’s most famous brands, media outlets, sports governing bodies, national and local governments, athletes, entertainers, models and fashion designers.

With operations in 30 countries, IMG’s 1,700 employees at 60 remote sites rely on a wealth of information to deliver the highest levels of quality service to the company’s many clients and marketing and media network partners.

By replacing its expensive legacy data protection solution in EMEA and disparate backup and recovery software throughout the rest of the world with Simpana software, IMG projects savings of up to $1 million over three years, as well as significant reductions in the cost of tape management globally.

According to IMG, the company is using Simpana software’s built-in deduplication feature to reduce the size of the company’s backup disk capacity requirements by up to 80 percent as compared to their previous solution. Additionally, the combination of Simpana backup, replication and archive modules is providing the entertainment giant huge gains in operational efficiency through reduced workload and delegation of tasks.

Global Data Management
with Deduplication, Replication & Archive
With Simpana software’s integrated functionality and seamless scalability, IMG is able to keep pace with rapid data growth, lower storage costs, reduce administrative overhead and achieve major gains in data retention and operational efficiencies.

With data at the company growing at more than 25 percent year on year, CommVault’s singular platform enables IMG to continuously scale its data management foundation to meet aggressive business expansion.

According to IMG, CommVault’s deduplication feature has enabled reduction of its estimated backup storage footprint by up to 80 percent, decreasing 216 TBs of data to 44 TBs enabling IMG to limit backup disk costs. The deduplicated data then is backed up and replicated to a regional hub for dramatic improvements in business continuity while ensuring rapid, reliable data recovery using existing bandwidth for remote sites.

IMG also reports that Simpana software’s intuitive, centralized management console provides a better level of service and faster recoveries. According to IMG, 95 percent of data restores now are performed by their internal help desk personnel, freeing IT staff to focus on more strategic technology initiatives. Additionally, the team expedites disk-based restores, which now take minutes instead of days to recover data from tape.

The company projects that Simpana software’s Archive module will enable retention of more than one year of data for accelerated recoveries while also providing better preparation to address future compliance and/or discovery requirements.

IMG’s network engineers are part of a 50-person IT department with responsibility for overseeing approximately 300 physical and virtual file servers running Microsoft Windows, UNIX and VMware vSPhere, respectively. The team also supports Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint, SQL Server and other core business applications.

Mark Connolly, senior network engineer for IMG, said:" With CommVault Simpana software, IMG saves costs and reduces complexity as we purchased a complete data management foundation. We could have pieced together a solution with separate products, but it was clear we’d get so much more with Simpana software, which would be so much easier to manage too. We projected IMG could save more than $1 million over three years by replacing our existing solutions with Simpana software while also decreasing our reliance on tape at remote sites worldwide. With Simpana software, we have the global building blocks in place that can be easily and economically added to over time. We always have two copies of data by replicating information between regional hubs. This gives us a higher level of protection than we’ve ever had before. Increasing IMG’s data by 25 percent won’t raise costs by 25 percent as we’ll simply add more agents and servers. CommVault’s singular platform will help us respond efficiently and effectively to whatever the business brings."

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