Commvault's Simpana 9 Eases Data Management

CommVault Systems has announced version nine of its Simpana data management software. Simpana 9 has better integration between physical and virtual cloud storage systems, offering a single policy interface across a three-tier storage architecture for data that is in use as well as backed-up data and data that is archived to disk, tape or to the cloud. Additionally, data can be restored from any tier. Their improved, source-based deduplication, which the company claims eliminates 90 percent of redundant data, produces 50 percent faster backup and cuts storage-related costs by 50 percent. The software runs on a wide variety of storage arrays and supports the use of several cloud services.

Brian Diegan, vice president of network services for the First National Bank of Pennsylvania, in Hermitage, says he is looking forward to checking out CommVault's claims that it can restore a server in 17 minutes. He is also interested in source-based deduplication. "There's dedupe at the source instead of running across the LAN, so it won't take up bandwidth," he says.

For organizations that have resisted migrating to Simpana because they have had a different backup software product in place for the past decade or so, the software includes the FastPass feature to download other network backup settings, such as from IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager and Symantec's NetBackup, into Simpana. There is also improved support for virtualized systems, including automatic discovery when virtual machines are created, and creating policies for them. This is required because users are adding virtual machines so quickly that IT staff can't keep up.

Other notable features include array-based snapshots and virtual machine self-discovery, says Noemi Greyzdorf, research manager for IDC. "SnapProtect allows off-load backups while retaining granular levels of restores. This is particularly interesting with VMware because CommVault has visibility into the virtual machine disk format and all application level information," she says.

"CommVault has been fast on the heels of VMware's latest developments to introduce efficiency in VM backup and recovery, supporting the latest APIs, and layering on its own features to make VM backup/recovery faster and better," agrees Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. Analysts also say they like the addition of source-based deduplication. "With deduplication, they offer it at the source system or further downstream in the data path, and on disk and on tape." Simpana 9 is available now for prices starting at $10,000. The company is also using a new licensing model, moving from 300 licensing options to three. A bulk licensing feature means that customers won't have to worry about licensing each individual server as they brings it up.