I was very fortunate to attend Virtualisation Field Day earlier this year. One of the companies presenting was CommVault who bill themselves as a “data” company.

They spent the majority of their time at Virtualisation Field Day going through all the details of how they can do backups and restores and to be honest it was rather dull. Backups are hugely critical to your infrastructure and just like insurance you don’t want to find out you are not protected when it is too late. The thing though is backup nowadays is such a utility service. It would be unfair to say that backups haven’t evolved because they have particularly with virtualisation but ultimately you are still taking a copy of your data and storing it remotely from your live data. The what hasn’t changed much even if the how has.

This makes talking about backup a difficult task because your audience always certainly knows what backup does and generally how it works even if your tool may have a few differences. Being able to back something up and restore it is a given, being able to mount backups of VMs and restore files within those backed up VMs is now a given as well however your backup vendor choses to do it.

I feel CommVault did itself a disservice at Virtualisation Field Day which is evident by the lack of post game talk and analysis about their solution compared to some of the other presentations, proof that backups are not sexy.

However I feel that CommVault has an interesting story to tell if they could just elevate themselves from the backup bandwagon.

CommVault Simpana’s USP is not in the backup but in the use and analysis of the data that has been ingested. I use ingested deliberately to make the distinction between it just being a backup used to recover something some time in the future. Companies are being asked to do more and more with their data, some of it is in live databases or files but a huge amount is actually archive data, old log files, old emails, old text messages, old voicemails, old x-rays, old files. Companies are often required legally to keep this old stuff around for a long time and you know how this is stored, in a completely separate copy from backups. Emails are journalled by product x. text messages by product y, voicemails by product z. These products may be even separate companies with completely separate data formats, there’s no way you could search across them.

If you could bring this all together and have it searchable across formats then that would be very useful. A hospital may need to track everything a doctor did regarding a particular patient who is suing the hospital. They want to see all old x-rays taken, all hand-written notes the doctor made, all voice calls the doctor made to the patient via the switchboard as well as mobile phone, camera footage in the operating theatre, prescription information from the pharmacy. You get the picture. How long do you think it would take the IT staff to gather this with segregated data sets to hand to the investigators/lawyers/auditors. If you had ingested all this information into a common storage platform, searching would be far far simpler and yeah of course you could restore a deleted file or even a whole VM as well.

Well, this is what CommVault Simpana intends to do with its content store and to me that is far more interesting than boring backup. The buzz words are on their side, its Big Data analytics, using your backups as the source data. Simpana is built as a single single platform for its integrated data and information management and has individually licensable modules to analyse, replicate, protect, archive and search your data.

I appreciate CommVault was presenting at Virtualisation Field Day and felt they needed to highlight the backup features of their product but that isn’t going to make anyone excited.

Ask anyone who’s heard of CommVault what the company does and the answer is a vague “backup product"". Their marketing message needs to change from backup centric to: look, of course we can protect your data with backups and restores but look here what we can also do for you as we have a copy of your data. Their demos could be so interesting showing searches across disparate data sets playing the role of lawyer, forensic investigator or compliance officer uncovering meaning in the data that would be very difficult to find elsewhere.

I sincerely wish CommVault good luck as I actually think they have a product that meets a huge need, they just don’t always like telling you its not just a backup product.

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