CommVault's (http://www.commvault.com/) (NASDAQ: CVLT) next-generation release, Simpana 9, breaks new ground by enabling companies to deploy for the first time truly modern data management (http://www.commvault.com/simpana.html) that bridges the physical storage world and the rapidly emerging virtual one.
As enterprises transform their IT landscapes to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs, legacy data management products lack the intelligence, automation and scalability to protect, store and recover vast amounts of data proliferating across physical, virtual and cloud computing (http://www.commvault.com/solutions-cloud-integration.html) environments.
Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group: “Demands for backup modernisation are elevated as CIOs seek ways to reduce costs and risk, while ensuring that IT decisions yield maximum value. With its new Simpana release, CommVault is breaking barriers with improved scalability, increased levels of protection, faster recovery, and greater efficiency for managing physical and virtual server environments. With new licensing options and migration enablement, CommVault is also making it more feasible for organisations to replace inefficient point solutions with Simpana 9 and realise the lower overhead and increased efficiency benefits CIOs care about most.”
The latest release of Simpana software solves these real-world IT challenges with major technology advancements, including increased virtualisation scalability and performance (http://www.commvault.com/solutions-virtualization.html), integrated source and target data deduplication (http://www.commvault.com/solutions-deduplication.html) , automatic and transparent integration with hardware array-based snapshots (http://www.commvault.com/solutions-snapprotect.html), as well as new tools that ease migration to CommVault's next-generation Simpana 9 platform.
With Simpana 9, CommVault delivers on its forward-looking vision of a better way to manage data, making it easier for customers to buy, deploy and support a data and information management strategy built on the industry's first modern data management software. By tightly integrating snapshot, replication and persistent copies that are secure, deduplicated and all managed by one protection policy behind a single pane of glass, Simpana 9 makes it easy for companies to not only back up and protect their data, but to quickly and easily find, access and recover it anywhere and at any time.
Automatic policies eliminate the need for manual management cycles while also tiering data seamlessly and efficiently from the application array to the cloud for significant capital and storage cost savings of up to 50%. By integrating deduplication at the source and target, Simpana software dramatically improves backup speeds and efficiency, eliminating up to 90% of redundant data and reducing network traffic by up to 90%. Simpana software's independence from hardware and storage appliances, coupled with its ability to scale effortlessly as a data center or virtual environment expands helps reduce downtime, improve SLAs, all while responding faster to changing business demands, both now and in the future.
N Robert Hammer, CommVault's chairman, president and CEO: “There's a lot to consider in today's brave new world of virtualisation and cloud computing, especially the impact on data management since legacy solutions typically require multiple, disjointed products to support the physical and virtual worlds of computing, as well as everything in between. With Simpana 9, we're changing all that by building on the strengths of our singular platform while delivering industry-leading automation, integration and scalability. Now more than ever, Simpana 9's unified platform, advanced functionality and software migration tools make it incredibly easy, efficient and economical to choose CommVault as the de facto standard in modern data management.”
Dave Russell, research vice-president for Gartner: “Cloud computing and virtualisation are important catalysts for change, enabling organisations to deploy new infrastructures to drive increased IT agility and greater business value. To reap these benefits, however, fundamental improvements in data management are warranted, especially as traditional backup and recovery no longer suffice for current - no less future - requirements. What's needed is a modern data management approach that scales massive amounts of information and automates well-defined processes to collapse backup windows, reduce labour costs and transform businesses with accelerated time-to-value.”
Today's announcement is the first in a two-pronged launch with additional information management capabilities to be announced later this month.
Expanded virtualisation scalability, support
* CommVault has enhanced its Simpana platform to support new Virtual Machines (VMs) and data growth by seamlessly scaling to safeguard thousands of VMs in heterogeneous environments without forcing customers to make compromises on data access or availability.
* Simpana 9 software also leverages CommVault's SnapProtect snapshot technology to provide rapid protection and recovery of VMs. Real world test results have shown that 500 VMs can be protected in just 17 minutes (http://www.commvault.com/solutions-virtualization-500vms.html) using Simpana software.
* Additionally, Simpana 9 dramatically reduces the complexity of managing and protecting sprawling VMs with advanced, automated discovery and more granular restore capabilities.
* CommVault's single console offers unique integrated visibility into resource consumption and storage utilisation for both virtual and physical environments resulting in simplified life cycle management, protection and retention of data across all tiers.
Universal deduplication encompassing source-side data reduction
* New source-side deduplication (http://www.commvault.com/solutions-deduplication.html) builds upon CommVault's proven, hardware-agnostic deduplication capabilities to reduce the amount of data being transferred across corporate networks for backup or replication by up to 90%, while slashing backup windows by more than 30%.
* Universal deduplication enables customers to have multiple protection policies, each with its own retention period, to access a common deduplication store and reduce redundant data across multiple locations, VMs and systems for major savings in global data footprints.
* For SAP customers, CommVault offers new integration capabilities including policy-based archiving for improved database and application performance.
* Simpana 9 deduplication takes advantage of CommVault's unified product architecture, with one set of shared resources and a centralised view of consolidated data, to deliver unprecedented flexibility in designing backup infrastructures and policies for datacenters and remote offices, based on business demands, not deduplication requirements.
Extended application management, integration
* With Simpana 9 software, CommVault delivers greater application protection by blending its SnapProtect technology (http://www.commvault.com/solutions-snapprotect.html) with integrated, intelligent data management that spans application, database and storage layers.
* With previous support for all other major platforms and applications, CommVault now also provides broadened storage array support for HP, IBM and LSI along with expanded application support for Microsoft Exchange 2010 and DB2 to ensure rapid recovery and improved SLAs.
* Simpana 9 enables users to extract messages and documents from SnapProtect copies of Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint without requiring the original application, thus expediting eDiscovery and search requirements while also offloading production servers.
Simplified licensing, 'Fast Pass' deployment ease migrations
* With Simpana 9, CommVault is unveiling a simplified, capacity-based licensing model with improved storage resource management featuring integrated reporting that automatically reassesses daily usage and provides threshold warnings along with trending analysis.
* CommVault is also making it much easier and faster for customers to migrate to the advantages of Simpana 9 by automating the replacement of legacy data management tools, such as Symantec NetBackup and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, with “Fast Pass” Simpana 9 software migration (http://www.commvault.com/simplifying-migration.html). These new tools can be used to auto-discover client information, policies and job details existing on legacy master servers.
* To further ease migration, CommVault transparently installs agents on targeted clients for immediate transition to Simpana 9 software without any impact to existing policies or job schedules.
* CommVault's new Migration Operations Services Suite provides a full breadth of professional services, audit management and best practices to ensure quick, trouble-free transitions while setting the stage for significant improvements in modern data management powered by CommVault.
* Additionally, all Simpana 9 customers can now test drive CommVault's Remote Operations Management Service (ROMS) (http://services.commvault.com/roms_information.asp) on install. Remote monitoring extends CommVault's support as the extra set of eyes and ears into end user's data management environments - reducing turnaround time, proactively correcting issues and establishing oversight.
Resources
* Register for Simpana 9 Virtual Launch Event: (http://bit.ly/9X9bvj)
* CommVault Simpana 9 Software Online Press Kit: (http://news.commvault.com/Simpana9/)
* More CommVault news: (http://news.commvault.com/)
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