Catholic Education Diocese in Australia Deploys CommVault Simpana

The Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta has
deployed CommVault Systems, Inc.‘ Simpana 9 software to increase operational efficiency and manage nearly 160TB
of student records, courseware and critical enterprise files.

A model for agile learning spaces and collaborative teaching,
Catholic Education serves 78 primary and secondary schools with more than 4,500
teachers and over 42,000 students in New South Wales, Australia. As part of it learning and teaching approach, it utilises
Web 2.0 technologies including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, as well as video
conferencing, interactive whiteboard systems and an e-Library online portal
with more than 300,000 books and resources, all supported by Cisco Unified Communications network with fibre connectivity for up to three
devices per student and more than 23,000 laptops.

After doubling its network capacity to accommodate an average of 400TB of Internet data downloads each month and transitioning from a physical
infrastructure to a virtual environment as part of a move to modernize
its data centre, Catholic Education’s IT team began experiencing challenges
with the reliability of its backup and restore operations. Also, with
compliance requirements to keep student data for up to 25 years – the IT team
faced an additional infrastructure burden in terms of long-term data retention
and related costs.

With the overall strategy of the new data centre in mind, the
organisation replaced its legacy system – which consolidated three disparate
backup applications used separately to each protect vital corporate, Exchange
and student data – with Simpana. With a single platform approach,it can now meet its backup windows and restore files in
minutes.

With CommVault’s approach to data management, the organisation also has
reduced administrative overheads in managing backup procedures in half
resulting in operational savings. With new features including
Simpana embedded global deduplication software, the organization now has
decreased file system backup data by approximately 56 percent while reducing
SQL and Exchange backups by nearly 80 percent. This has helped to significantly
improve backup performance, reduced the amount of data on the network, while
also enabling the organisation to scale as needs dictate.

Data Protection
Catholic Education expects to utilise Simpana’s virtual
server agent to extend reliable data protection to its growing VMware virtualised environment.

Additionally, the IT team plans to take advantage of CommVault’s
SnapProtect technology to perform multiple recovery points throughout the day
to ensure the ability to meet strict, two-hour service level agreements with
the finance department.

According to Catholic Education, being able to use Simpana
with any combination of disk storage yields economies of scale as the optimal
platform can be selected based on performance, retention requirements and price
point.

Matthew Doepel, CTO, Catholic Education Diocese
of Parramatta, said:"It was clear that
CommVault was the leading proposal given to us as it was the only solution that
met all our criteria. Using one console and a singular platform, we could
accomplish everything we required. CommVault’s technical
services team is very professional and easy to work with. They understood how
we work and what we are trying to achieve, so we were impressed by CommVault’s
response in meeting our objectives. Our strategy is to reduce reactive work from
95 to 50 percent, freeing time to work on more strategic projects. CommVault
gives us the ability to respond more efficiently and reduces time spent on
reactive tasks. We are very confident
in our data protection abilities and our experience of Simpana software has
been 100 per cent positive."

Tristan Slusarczyk, system support engineer, Catholic Education
Diocese of Parramatta, said: "CommVault’s dedupe
ratios have exceeded our expectations in terms of reducing enterprise and
school data. We were able to decrease our file-system data by nearly 56 percent
while deduping SQL and Exchange data produced a savings of nearly 80 percent.
Restores have been excellent as we simply
hit the ‘restore’ button and away we go. It typically only takes a couple of
minutes to recover Word docs, which are our most frequent recovery requests. We
are really looking forward to implementing Simpana software’s virtual server
agent. CommVault’s reporting features will also prove useful in providing
greater visibility into both our physical and virtual environment."