Overview
With the current state of the economy, efficiency and IT spending reduction are the themes of the moment. As shown in Figure 1, ESG research found that more than one-fifth (22%) of IT departments characterize their IT spending change from 2008 to 2009 as being in "major cost reduction mode," while another one-third (32%) claim they are in "moderate cost reduction mode", and another one-third (33%) are watching spending carefully and may cancel or postpone some projects while in "cost containment mode." [1]
IT is challenged to lower costs, but not at the expense of introducing risk or impacting value. ESG research found that IT teams are feeling significant pressure to more effectively support the business, increase asset utilization, and improve information management and security-all while holding down costs across the board.[2]
At the same time, relentless information growth is necessitating greater investments in IT infrastructure. Double-digit data growth rates are fueled by a dependence on digital assets to conduct business and the need to support an increasingly mobile workforce. IT organizations struggle to keep pace with unabated growth, especially when it comes to storing data for recovery purposes.
IT organizations are being tasked to do more with less, and feel pressure to meet business demands. ESG's research respondents believe that ongoing operational cost reduction is, by a significant margin, the most important justification for IT investment now and over the next 12-24 months. This reinforces the notion that customers will favor products and services that allow them to improve management processes, reduce headcount, consolidate data centers, reduce power consumption, or otherwise streamline operations. [3]
Technologies that create efficiency and deliver rapid ROI will sustain investment. When it comes to data protection and data management, here are a few key considerations:
- Unified platforms. Centralizing data management operations simplifies management for operational gains and improves utilization of capacity and resources.
- Integrated archiving. In addition to meeting regulatory, corporate governance, and electronic discovery requirements, archive solutions can also control storage costs. Implementing basic retention policies and enforcing them helps meet compliance objectives-and avoid fines-and garners storage capacity efficiency on both primary and secondary storage systems.
- Data deduplication. Data capacity growth is not going to abate. And data protection processes, such as backup and replication, magnify capacity growth. Therefore, it makes sense for organizations to employ tactics and technology to optimize this environment-without sacrificing performance or introducing risk with recovery practices. Data deduplication has emerged as a compelling technology to control storage capacity and costs.
- Monitoring and reporting. Operational complexity and data growth have stretched many IT management organizations to the limit. Implementing monitoring and management tools help IT gain more visibility into, and control over, interrelated technologies; identify inefficiencies in the environment; automate manual tasks; and improve communication within IT and between IT and business constituents.
Analysis
Simpana 8 software attacks the inefficiencies of retaining data copies for recovery and discovery with enhancements that optimize the capture and storage of data copies as well as data retrieval.
Data deduplication, available at the file-level in the previous Simpana 7 version, has been significantly improved with native sub-file-level deduplication. Simpana 8 now deduplicates at the block level and across media servers within the same storage policy group to increase reduction ratios. The deduplication process can be distributed across client agents (hash calculation) and media servers (duplicate elimination) to minimize the impact on source production servers and improve efficiency. Since Simpana software is aware of the content, it knows what data should be examined for redundancy and, when it performs the examination, it can segment the file into chunks based on natural pattern breaks. Data passed to the media server can be optimized (compressed) to reduce network bandwidth requirements. Only unique data is written to media-which can include disk or tape. Deduplicating at the tape tier reduces the long-term storage costs for backup and archive data. If recovery performance from deduplicated data is a concern, Simpana software has a response. For restore, data can be recovered from deduplicated disk, deduplicated tape (with recovery first to disk), or from an un-deduplicated full backup for the most rapid restore requirements.
Another layer of efficiency in the backup process is introduced with Simpana software's SnapBackup capability. Simpana 8 leverages the snapshot engines of leading storage system vendors, such as EMC and NetApp, to create application-consistent point-in-time images-catalogued by Simpana software for rapid recovery of unstructured and application data. This technique eliminates the backup window and enables recovery from any location or device-even providing self-service, eliminating operator intervention and service desk calls.
Despite hefty expenditures to enable mobile and remote employees, most IT organizations focus their efforts and budgets on protecting server-resident data. ESG research reveals that just one quarter of respondents indicated that 100% of their desktop PCs are currently backed up, and only 18% of organizations back up all of their laptops. Conversely, 24% of respondents say they have no process at all to back up their desktops and 29% fail completely to back up their laptops.[4] CommVault's desktop/laptop protection automates backup and maintenance of server-based recovery points for endpoint systems. End-user self-service supplies the aforementioned benefits around recovery efficiency. An additional benefit is that laptop data can be selectively indexed to meet proactive eDiscovery requirements.
More than 70% of ESG research survey respondents indicated that their organizations presently use server virtualization (with 49% using it in a production environment), with another 13% planning to do so. VMware and Microsoft make up nearly 75% of the hypervisors in use.[5] Simpana software has a single client agent to support the popular hypervisors from VMware and Microsoft, as well as multiple approaches to back up and recover virtual server data-including image-level, file-level, and volume-level options-with granular recovery for any method and incremental backup for .vmdk images. The Simpana suite automatically discovers virtual machines and associates a backup policy.
CommVault Simpana software offers two types of indexing-the default catalog, which collects metadata as data moves through storage policies, and the FAST-based indexing engine, which indexes "post-process." What's new in 8.0 is Content Director, which provides automatic classification, categorization, and movement of data based on defined rules and/or search patterns. The opportunity is to define workflow around searches and perform intelligent tagging and legal holds. This will enable simplified reviews and user-driven searches-saving time and effort. Simpana 8 also allows a more granular approach to retention strategies, leading to improvements in access and cost savings. Finally, Simpana 8 is integrated with leading enterprise content management systems. For example, Simpana software is able to automatically "push" data into a Microsoft SharePoint repository.
The Bottom Line
CommVault Simpana software's single platform architecture and unified approach enables intelligent management of data through its lifecycle, incorporating backup, archiving, replication, reporting, and eDiscovery for data in various physical and virtual platforms. One of the benefits of its underlying framework is that CommVault has been able to aggressively advance its feature set instead of spending time integrating acquired or OEM'ed technologies, as some of its competitors do.CommVault's implementation of deduplication does some rule-breaking. It's the first native deduplication in an enterprise-scale backup solution. CommVault's approach makes it possible to deduplicate more widely than at a single media server-providing more efficiency. Lastly, Simpana software can export compressed data to tape for long-term retention (that's the rule breaker), enabling deduplication across storage tiers. CommVault's decision to charge for this feature was a surprise given that other solutions use it as a no-cost differentiator. The company must feel confident that it can deliver on its reduction ratio claims without impacting performance by competing directly with charge-for deduplication, such as hardware-based solutions.
Data growth is unavoidable given the world's dependence on digital content to conduct business. In an effort to "control" it, IT organizations apply more infrastructure-typically storage systems, bandwidth, management software, etc.-only exacerbating the situation by creating complexity and increasing expenses. CommVault Simpana 8 is one of the rare solutions attacking the problem on many levels-delivering economies of scale and cost benefits that will garner attention from CommVault customers and non-customers alike.
[1] Source: ESG Research Report, 2009 Data Center Spending Intentions Survey, March 2009.
[2] Source: ESG Research Report, Medium-Sized Businesses Storage and Server Priorities, June 2008.
[3] Source: ESG Research Report, 2009 Data Center Spending Intentions Survey, March 2009.
[4] Source: ESG Research Report, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, December 2008.
[5] Ibid.
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