New Commvault Retention Solution

CommVault Systems Inc. announced a content-based retention solution that enables enterprises to keep only data that is important to the business and move beyond the ‘keep everything’ approach to data management.

Leveraging Simpana Reference Copy can reduce long-term storage costs and capacity needs by up to 70% when compared to traditional approaches to data retention. Organizations can make sense of their content, streamline discovery to improve insight and make decisions about how they want to retain it, while at the same time making cloud storage from providers such as AWS, Microsoft and Rackspace a reality through data classification and retention capabilities.

Legacy solutions that focus on backup or force customers to archive irrelevant data, without compliance, evidentiary or other organizational value, increase overall costs and risk and inhibit cloud adoption. Traditional archive platforms are cumbersome and make it difficult to secure, find and recover siloed data across the enterprise. Long-term data retention approaches need to be automated, flexible and granular.

According to Gartner, most organizations (62%) still do not utilize any specific tools to help them understand and to make decisions on the retention/management of their unstructured data. Archiving is starting to penetrate organizations, but this is often just moving the problem from primary storage to a less expensive archive.

Addresses Information Governance, Cost Concerns
This addresses these requirements by leveraging the intelligence to collect, organize, index and classify data based on user-defined policies. Once data is centralized in the ContentStore, the hardware agnostic virtual repository provides automated, granular policies for tiering, retention and classification that allow business to keep only the relevant files and emails. Enabling online long-term storage, centralized search and self-service access for analytics and eDiscovery make the software tailored for highly regulated or litigious industries that must retain data for seven or more years, such as healthcare, government and education.

Accelerating Journey to the Cloud
The ability to reduce the cost for online capacity and data transfers makes cloud storage more affordable and easier to manage. Business-defined policies identify data to be retained and reduce the amount of data being moved into and out of the cloud. When used in tandem with Simpana 10’s content indexing and search capabilities, which provide previews, it can help provide access to archived content without needing to access the cloud. Combined with native connectivity with more than a dozen cloud platforms, including certifications for the new VTL appliance from AWS and integration for AWS Glacier, can speed the adoption of cloud storage for all enterprises.

Optimizing Data Retention with Consulting Services
The company’s consulting services helps clients architect management environments and deploy long-term retention, compliance and cloud strategies to optimize their data and information management environments. Two of the archiving consulting services available from CommVault include:

• Data Classification and Archive Policy Design – Synthesizes legacy archive strategies with business, compliance, records retention, and eDiscovery requirements to help transform a client’s traditional operation into an intelligent archive.
• Electronic Records Management Design – Provides assessment to assist with designing and recommending technical and business requirements for records retention management and potential eDiscovery actions.

The solution is available as part of the Simpana 10 software platform from CommVault or its global Partner Advantage reseller network of channel, OEM, MSP and distributor partners.

David West, SVP, worldwide marketing and business development, CommVault, said: “Storage costs today are out of control due to data growth, much of which is caused by legacy solutions and outdated ‘keep everything’ approaches to information management. The key to efficient data management and intelligent archiving is to eliminate irrelevant data, keeping only what you need to ensure information transparency, accountability and defensibility across the business. By leveraging Simpana Reference Copy and the ContentStore, users can not only ensure that data is classified, organized and retained in a secure way, but they can control and use big data for a competitive advantage and bring value to their organizations.”

Eric Sheppard, research director, storage software, IDC, said: “Businesses increasingly struggle not only with exponential data growth but also with how, what, and where to keep that data. IT teams strive to provide value back to their organization, yet users continue to drown in a deluge of data. CommVault’s new content-based retention feature has policy-driven rules that allow the flexibility to design and customize rules around the data they want to retain and how they want to retain it. This is particularly useful in highly regulated work environments where managing risk is critical to the business operation.“