CommVault Updates Simpana Data Management Solution

Information architecture specialist CommVault has launched a unified information governance platform, intended to complement the recently-released Simpana 9 data management solution, which is designed to give MSPs and their customers a bridge to virtualized and cloud storage environments. Here’s the scoop on CommVault’s most recent offerings.

The idea behind Simpana 9, according to CommVault VP of Marketing and Business Development David West, is to provide the enterprise with a scalable way to protect, store, and recover data that lays across any kind of environment. The link between cloud and on-premises isn’t new for CommVault and Simpana, but they’ve expanded that idea for the release.

The real value, West says, is in tiering and integrated target/source deduplication. Put simply, Simpana 9 aims to be smart enough to use automatic policies to decide on-the-fly what data belongs in local, higher-availability storage, and which can safely stay in the remote location and in deeper storage.

That data dedupe functionality on both ends keeps backup and recovery speeds quick and network traffic down up to a claimed 90 percent. West claims Simpana 9 can back up 500 virtual machines in 17 minutes, and with the lowered storage requirements hardware investment can dip as much as 50 percent.

That’s not all that’s new: Simpana 9 also adds “automatic and transparent integration with hardware array-based snapshots,” as well as migration tools and a single interface to manage protection policies.

Where the CommVault Information Governance platform comes in is to help make the information stored by Simpana more manageable, with a goal of giving enterprises easier and cheaper compliance, archiving, records management, and eDiscovery.

The two announcements have a common thread: CommVault clearly has its eye on making information more manageable whether it’s in a legacy system or kept in the cloud. What’s more, the company’s literature has a focus on single-platform policies and workflow automation.

CommVault’s West says that MSPs should look at Simpana 9 over other storage offerings because it represents the most complete, fully-featured, and easiest way to move customers and themselves from legacy to virtualized storage. But only time will tell if the channel follows CommVault’s lead.

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