Commvault Review

Data protection is a challenge for most organisations and many are very dissatisfied with their current solutions – common issues tend to be:

• Point solutions are used for VMware/Hyper-V, physical servers, laptops, remote offices and archiving which increases complexity and costs
• Purpose-Built Backup Appliances (PBBAs) are used, whilst they work well, they further increase the costs
• Ever increasing amounts of data are becoming difficult to backup in the amount of time available
• Tape backups can be unreliable, restores are slow and they are expensive to manage

To address the problem NetApp and CommVault have created joint reference architectures that consist of NetApp E-Series storage and CommVault Simpana software – just add virtual or physical servers and away you go.

So how do these joint reference architectures solve these issues?

• NetApp E-Series provides:
  • Huge amounts of high-throughput and easy to expand storage, at a cost per TB way lower than PBBAs, that either negates the need for tape or keeps its use to an absolute minimum
• CommVault Simpana provides:
  • A single solution to address all the above data protection use cases – managed from one console
  • An advanced software based de-duplication engine, similar to that found in PBBAs, tightly integrated with the data protection application
  • Advanced techniques for reducing backup times (i.e. source-based de-duplication, archiving, incrementals forever and array snapshots)

So we know it is good, but how much does it all cost?

The beauty of this solution is that it includes two disk libraries therefore backing up to tape will often not be required, unless very long term retention is needed and even then it is likely to be very infrequent.

The above table is designed to demonstrate the affordability of the solution, in reality most organisations would want to customise both the software licenses and the amount of storage capacity to meet their exact needs.

Download the NetApp E-Series & CommVault Simpana datasheet to learn more.