Johannesburg, 06 Jul 2012
Centurion Systems, a leading South African manufacturer of gate and access automation equipment, has improved operational efficiencies in its IT environment, following its implementation of the CommVault Simpana Backup and Recovery software. The solution today caters for a fast-changing data centre that includes nearly 30 virtual servers as well as a 34-terabyte storage area network.
Several years ago, Centurion realised it needed to urgently review the solution it had in place for backing up its SAP environment if it was to cater for the growth in the size and complexity of its IT environment, says Paul Mearns, IT Manager at Centurion. In addition, the company ran into some licensing and support challenges when its previous backup software supplier was acquired by another vendor.
The company needed a solution that would interoperate with a complex environment, underpinned by the VMware server virtualisation solution and an EMC Clariion storage area network (SAN). Centurion Systems evaluated a number of the offerings available in the market before it decided that CommVault Simpana Backup and Recovery software would be the solution to its problem.
At that time, the CommVault solution was the only product Centurion considered that met one of its most important criteria - a robust module for SAP backed by certification from SAP. “The costs and risks of using a platform that does not have SAP's official stamp of approval are enormous,” says Mearns. “For that reason, we saw CommVault's strategic alignment with SAP as an important advantage.”
The deployment of the software was quick and painless, allowing Centurion to achieve its goal of putting a backup solution in place that fully protects all of its virtual platforms and ensures the integrity of its valuable business information. The software is intuitive and easy to use, which has meant that Mearns has been able to rapidly train his technicians to manage and support it, freeing up his time for more strategic IT concerns.
The software has proven able to support and scale with the massive changes going on inside the Centurion data centre. The SAP environment alone has grown from four servers to 13 in a compressed timeframe, but it has been easy for Centurion's IT staff to add new servers and applications to the backup process as required.
In future, Centurion is eyeing an implementation of the data de-duplication functionality of CommVault's software to achieve further cost-savings, says Mearns. By removing duplicate data records from its system, it will be able to avoid adding more storage to its network at a time that hard drive costs are soaring.
“I am more than happy with the CommVault product. It does everything I need it to, in a manner that is cost-effective, operationally efficient and reliable. It has taken the pain and worry out of data backup for our business,” Mearns adds.
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