CommVault Simpana Adopted by Columbia College Chicago

As part of an enterprise data management upgrade designed to support expected student growth and business transformation within the college, Columbia College Chicago, the largest and most diverse private arts and media college in the nation, has upgraded its legacy Symantec Veritas Backup Exec environment with CommVault Simpana software.

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According to the college, Simpana software plays an increasingly important role in reducing the cost, complexity and risk of managing a heavily virtualized environment. With more than 5,000 faculty and staff dependent on email for their work and research needs, Columbia College uses Simpana software to better control the growth and costs of storing Microsoft Exchange data, while enabling the college to respond more efficiently and effectively to eDiscovery actions. Message and document recoveries from large databases for eDiscovery previously took up to 50 hours, according to Columbia College. The Simpana Search module now enables searches for discoveries in minutes.

Further optimizing its storage environment, Simpana software’s embedded deduplication feature has cut its backup window in half, reducing Exchange backups from 15 to less than seven hours, according to the college.

With CommVault’s Singular Information Management approach, the college also has set the stage for enhanced, economical disaster recovery by adding the Simpana Replication module, as Columbia College can now consolidate remote backups from a single point of control without requiring a separate product to manage.

A team of eight network and telecom experts manage the college’s IT environment, which comprises 80 Windows file servers, of which half are virtualized, along with Mac and Linux servers. The college encourages its more than 12,500 students to foster a lifelong passion for art, media and self-expression by providing an unparalleled array of courses and exceptional technological resources. Accomplished alumni include Mauro Fiore, who recently won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography on Avatar.

Adding Advanced Degrees
of Simpana Software Functionality
Columbia College Chicago continually takes advantage of CommVault’s singular platform and advanced functionality to add incremental capabilities that further streamline business processes, lower costs and improve overall data and information management.

With CommVault’s Universal Virtual Server Agent, the college speeds backups and decreases resource contention by offloading backup operations from virtual machines using the VMware vStorage API to backup Windows 2008 servers. Simpana software also automates the discovery and protection of virtual machines. Adding new virtual machines to protection policies which previously involved several hours of manual administrator intervention, is now performed automatically.

The college’s legal staff performs ‘self serve” searches by using Simpana software’s simple-to-use, web-based search tool and content indexing functionality. According to Columbia College, producing discovery results previously took several hours. Now, the combination of Simpana Archive and Search modules produces search results for eDiscovery in minutes. Additionally, CommVault’s offline mining tools facilitate granular recovery of messages and documents directly from database recovery copies, a process that before used to take up to 50 hours.

Columbia College plans to extend archiving to file systems, including Mac systems, which will enable elimination of a separate point product and include heterogeneous file system archiving under CommVault’s umbrella product platform.

Matt Piccirilli, System Administrator for Columbia College Chicago, said: "With Simpana software, we’ve covered our bases in terms of protecting, managing, reducing and discovering data. When it comes to reliable backup and recovery, streamlining key business processes and expediting access to electronically stored information, Simpana software does it all. We really like how CommVault’s multiple media agents worked together. We can view everything in the centralized console and immediately know the status of our backup jobs. We couldn’t justify the price of adding a dedupe appliance, which easily would have cost more than twice as much as adding CommVault’s deduplication software. We didn’t want to add more hardware and liked CommVault’s holistic dedupe approach as it spanned both disk and tape tiers of storage. The ‘self serve’ search functionality is really appealing to our legal department since we’ve empowered them to perform their own searches and restores without IT involvement which saves us several hours at a time. With the Simpana Search module, we’ve been able to streamline both access and discovery of electronically stored information while improving productivity and reducing risk."