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Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview: CommVault

January 8th, 2015

Virtualisation Field Day 4 is happening in Austin, Texas from 14th-16th January and I’m very lucky to be invited as a delegate.

I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post: Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview.

CommVault

Commvault is a data company (what backup companies also now call themselves) and has previously presented at Virtualization Field Day 3 and Tech Field Day 9.

Calling Commvault just a backup company isn’t a little disparaging as their software aims to do a lot more and rather like to think of themselves as providing information management. Sure, backing up and restoring data is important but there are a lot more reasons why you need to keep a copy of your data. You may need to keep an email archive for compliance reasons, journal instant messages from your traders for legal reasons so your lawyers have evidence to sift through or securely store x-rays for a long period of time. Archives, journaling, backups, reporting, legal discovery all rolled into one. It can suck in a whole bunch of stuff from end point laptops to mobile devices across physical, virtual, cloud, database, file, email, unix, Mac and windows. It has broad reach without the dreary and clunky legacy of TSM and NetBackup and although not as sexy, simple or targeted as Veeam, can do a lot more.

Their product is called Simpana and their trick is to have a single code base for integrating the backup and information management so you only need to store one deduplicated copy to be able to do a whole lot with it. This data repository is called the Content Store. Obviously backups need multiple copies to be spread around for protection and you can do that.

The Content Store is there for you to do whatever you want from it from a single console. Analyse, search, restore, correlate, access, retain, report to your hearts content. You can add policy to your data so emails are kept for 2 years, 7 years for your brokers, files for 3 months, old VMs for 30 days, you name it. Normally enterprises have a huge hodge podge of different solutions to do this requiring multiple copies and not being able to search easily across them. Simpana is sold as one solution to do it all.

Another trick up their sleeve is allowing users to securely retrieve information via mobile devices to do self-service restores and even access anything from the Content Store remotely so for example searching for and bringing up a presentation.

Commvault has previously presented on what the virtualisation backup technology does but there’s so much more. I’ve seen them at numerous VMworlds but haven’t had a chance to get to know them better as their solution looks very interesting.

Gestalt IT is paying for travel, accommodation and things to eat to attend Virtualisation Field Day but aren’t paying a penny for me to write anything good or bad about anyone.

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