CI Investments Implements CommVault Simpana

CI Investments, a subsidiary of CI Financial Corp., an independent wealth management firm with approximately $94 billion in fee-earning assets, has implemented CommVault Simpana software to drive significant disaster recovery cost savings and operational efficiencies. By investing in Simpana enterprise data and information management software, CI Investments projects a 12-to-18 month ROI and forecasts a savings in storage-related costs of more than $1 million over a four-year period.

To enhance investor protection, ensure excellent customer service and better comply with key Canadian regulations, CI Investments is leveraging Simpana software including Simpana Backup & Recovery, Replication and Archive modules, as well as Simpana software’s integrated Deduplication feature.

CommVault Simpana software provides scalability, simplified administration, support for multiple applications, and a single pane of glass management view of data across the organization. As a result, CI Investments cites major strides in accommodating rapid business growth, more automated business processes, and improved availability of mission-critical financial data.

CI Investments manages a mix of 250 physical and virtual file servers running Microsoft Windows, IBM AIX and Sun Solaris and 135 TBs of near-line storage to support crucial Sybase, Oracle and SQL databases that fuel essential fund administration and trading systems.

Investing in Simpana Software’s Singular Platform
to Boost Efficiency, Lower Costs
According to the investment management company, Simpana software’s singular platform facilitates access to different types of scalable, flexible functionality that helps increase efficiencies, enable business process improvement and reduce costs.

CI Investments selected CommVault’s embedded deduplication capability as the company felt Simpana software’s hardware-independent approach would scale more affordably. With the addition of deduplication, storage requirements are expected to be slashed by 50 percent to save a projected $288,000 in media and offsite storage costs over a four-year period.

To ensure the highest levels of protection, encrypted and compressed deduplicated data is replicated to a central site using the Simpana Replication module, which eases disaster recovery. According to the company, the elimination of daily backups to tape, which CI Investments reports saves 25-percent in tape storage costs, has led to the projection of an additional savings of $433,000 over four years.

CI Investments also takes advantage of the Simpana Archive module to migrate less-critical data from Tier 1 to less-expensive Tier 2 storage. The company reports that secondary storage yields a 30 percent savings over Tier 1 SAN costs, which is projected to save $480,000 over the same four-year period.

Using the Simpana backup module, CI Investments reports a 40 percent reduction in its nightly backup window, decreasing the time it takes to backup data from 11 hours to less than six. Meanwhile, the company has migrated from tape to disk for daily backups and restores, which has decreased recovery times from 15 hours to less than two.

The customer also reports plans to further leverage CommVault’s virtualization support as well as other Simpana software features to simplify the search and discovery of Exchange data to reinforce compliance, audit and eDiscovery capabilities.

From Terry Tick, vice president of infrastructure at CI Investments, said: "With Simpana software, we’ve streamlined business processes so we can better allocate resources while taking business continuity to a whole new level. Along the way, we’ve driven down disaster recovery costs while delivering unparalleled customer service. The closer we looked at Simpana software, it became clear that we could take advantage of a single platform to deal with rapid business growth as well as facilitate fast data recovery without overburdening our infrastructure. CommVault Simpana software’s flexibility, scalability and ease of use combined to clinch the deal. We also were able to project a 12-to-18 month ROI in Simpana software, which enabled us to build a compelling business case for standardizing on CommVault.With Simpana software, we have access to all types of functionality that will continually give us a leg up in increasing efficiencies while reducing costs. So far, our total projected savings in storage-related costs over the next four years exceed $1 million and we’re not done yet. We look forward to working with CommVault to reach new heights in DR preparedness and enterprise data management."

From Brian D’Souza, manager of UNIX infrastructure at CI Investments, said: "CommVault’s global dedupe works across all data types, sources and platforms without the same limitations as dedupe appliances. With CommVault’s hardware-agnostic solution, scaling would be more affordable since we could add commodity hardware as our data grew without being tied to a dedicated and expensive appliance. Consolidating and automating backups with Simpana software is huge for us. We no longer have to deal with multiple software products or manage separate contracts all over the country. The Simpana archive module is enabling another great data reduction strategy for us, but it’s also helping us improve overall information management so we can address data retention and information lifecycle issues more effectively. With CommVault technology, we also can ease the search and discovery of all Exchange data as part of a plan to reinforce compliance, audit and eDiscovery capabilities."

CI Investments case study