LWG Consulting With CommVault Simpana

LWG Consulting, a company that works with insurance companies on disaster recovery, damage assessment and loss consulting solutions, has deployed CommVault Systems, Inc.‘s Simpana software to elevate company-wide business continuity across 22 locations worldwide.

Lower TCO, improved data availability and the ability to manage rapid data growth were business drivers for LWG as the company made the decision to replace its legacy Symantec environment with CommVault Simpana software.

In keeping with corporate best practices, LWG keeps millions of high-resolution photos and data captured during insurance investigations for 12 years, creating 100 TBs of storage, which continues to grow by about one terabyte per week.

After experiencing repeated problems with full backups, which took two months to complete, as well as deduplication problems that caused database corruptions and lost backups, the company now takes advantage of Simpana software’s scalable, data protection approach with disk-based backup and recovery, deduplication, replication and archive capabilities to meet critical RTOs/RPOs.

LWG estimates that selecting CommVault Simpana software over competitive solutions, including EMC Avamar, Data Domain or IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), has saved the company more than $1 million in costs when compared to products that would have locked LWG into additional, expensive and proprietary hardware.

CommVault’s Modern Data Management Delivers Benefits

According to LWG, only CommVault Simpana software met the company’s 15-item selection criteria checklist, which included the ability to backup files over a slow WAN link, replicate backups to another site, take full-image backups of virtual machines (VMs) and perform message-level backups in Microsoft Exchange environments.
According to LWG, CommVault’s global deduplication exceeded expectations; the company has reduced its backup footprint significantly to yield a 92.6 percent space savings between servers at all locations.
Additionally, LWG claims to have achieved a 79 percent compression ratio, which enables the company to perform full backups in less than two hours. Moreover, LWG appreciates the ease with which application restores are handled; the granularity of Exchange 2010 recoveries allows LWG to recover entire mailboxes or individual files, including LinkedIn contacts and RSS feeds.
LWG has improved its disaster recovery capabilities while meeting RTO/RPO goals. The company plans to leverage Simpana archive to reclaim additional space on primary storage.
A team of three people oversees LWG’s technology environment, which comprises one physical and 150 virtual servers that support applications and data for 275 users across 22 sites worldwide.

Paul Slager, Director of IT for LWG Consulting, said: "We developed a 15-item checklist for consideration and were told by a reseller that you can’t have everything. Then we came upon CommVault Simpana software and were pleased to find we could get it all in one platform.

"In addition to better TCO and big-ticket items, like global dedupe, CommVault also handled the finer details, such as suspending or resuming backups, which we knew would be huge for us with our limited WAN pipe.

"CommVault Simpana software is the clear winner for us in terms of functionality, cost and customer support. We’re nine months ahead of our initial ROI projection, mostly due to the great results we’re seeing.

"CommVault’s customer support is probably the best I have ever experienced with any product. CommVault meets our business needs and allows us all to breathe a bit easier knowing our data is fully protected."