Backup & Recovery

Simpana® 9 Backup and Recovery software is the foundation of a modern data management solution. And a modern solution allows users to better manage information assets, recover data more quickly, and ultimately save money over loosely integrated, legacy solutions.

CommVault optimized Simpana 9 software in order to protect data and information assets wherever they reside; physical, virtual, and in the cloud. It delivers a truly unified approach that helps users achieve dramatic results.

• Reduce data protection costs by as much as 50 percent.
• Protect 500 virtual machines in less than 17 minutes.
• Cut the backup window in half.
• Recover data and applications near instantaneously.
• Transfer 90 percent less data across the network.
• Seamlessly extend data protection to the cloud, and back.
• Move from legacy backup solutions to Simpana 9 in days, not weeks.

Optimized Backup & Recovery

Simpana 9 is optimized to protect virtual platforms, and is equipped to support and scale with the massive changes going on inside the data center. Specialized backup tools often miss the broader needs of heterogeneous environments. But Simpana 9, with its support for multiple hypervisors, helps users protect hundreds of VMs in minutes and easily scales to thousands of VMs and physical servers.

Simpana 9 is optimized to protect and recover applications and databases, fast. Significantly reduce production impact and achieve near instant recovery with automated, policy driven SnapProtectTM technology for both physical and virtual environments. Users can also leverage existing storage investments to significantly reduce backup windows and speed recovery from any data protection tier.

Simpana 9 is optimized for data reduction. CommVault was the first backup software provider to fully integrate data deduplication into its solution. Today, CommVault builds on that leadership with its Gen 3 deduplication capabilities. Users can reduce data at the source by 90 percent, cut their backup window, significantly reduce bandwidth requirements and still integrate with key data management operations like snapshots, archiving, search, encryption, and direct recovery from deduplicated tape.

Simpana 9 is optimized for data protection in the cloud. CommVault led the market by enabling native cloud storage connectors that eliminate scripting and cloud gateway appliances. These connectors work in concert with deduplication to reduce bandwidth and capacity costs, and leverage encryption for secure delivery and storage. No major software vendor currently offers integrated cloud storage connectors and a full suite of data management capabilities like CommVault.

Take a Fast Pass to Modern Data Management

CommVault enables users of outdated, legacy backup software move to Simpana 9 in a matter of days, not weeks. We make it easier than ever for Symantec NBU and IBM TSM customers to modernize. Simpana 9 discovery agents can find and report on client assets, policy, and job details. Legacy backup agents can be automatically converted to Simpana software agents eliminating many of the technical challenges associated with changing software. Finally, users can elect to use capacity-based licensing and a variety of service options to make the switch even simpler.

Simpana 9 Backup and Recovery software is a robust suite of data management capabilities built on a truly unified platform. Users dramatically simplify their data protection operations and when combined; these translate into more reliable data protection. Many users report they have shortened backup windows, improved overall backup success rates, and reduced management costs at the same time.

SnapProtect

Simpana® SnapProtect™ Technology Recover Terabytes of Critical Application Data in Minutes

With a rapid-fire, persistent, hardware-based snapshot capability fully integrated, Simpana SnapProtect™ technology delivers the performance capability to protect the largest, most demanding virtual and physical server environments - and recover them in minutes. By creating hardware snapshot copies internal to the storage array, high speed recovery copies can be created with minimal impact on the production servers. In just a few minutes, hundreds of systems and their associated business applications can be protected.

While other solutions are stuck protecting and recovering systems and applications over the network, we are focused on capturing your entire environment as quickly as possible and getting out of the way of your production applications. To this end, we leverage hardware-based snapshots that let us:

• Create recovery copies without moving a single piece of data – this minimizes the burden on production servers.
• Create multiple recovery points throughout each day – minimizing the risk to your business and improving service level delivery.
• Deliver a protection and recovery capability independent of underlying hardware – you can use Simpana® software on whatever storage array hardware you already have.
• Easily recover applications and data, irrelevant of what storage tier it’s residing on.

The Most Advanced Recovery Capabilities Anywhere
Recover individual objects, files, whole volumes or entire applications - all from within the Simpana® management console. Whether you are running Microsoft Exchange or SQL Server, SAP, Oracle, DB2 or SAP, there is no manual mounting, no recovery scripts, and no extra steps needed – Simpana software and SnapProtect™ technology takes care of it all. Enabling object-level recovery internal to a database is as simple as selecting a checkbox in the management console to enable SharePoint document access, mailbox access and mailbox archives from SnapProtect™ initiated snapshots.

With Simpana software we say the proof is in the pudding. You can browse your backup jobs directly from the Simpana console and view not only virtual and physical machines, but volumes, files, objects and entire applications as well.

Maximize Your Existing Investment in Storage Systems and Networks
With SnapProtect™ technology you now can fully leverage investments made in high speed Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks, as well as the high performance of today’s storage arrays to tackle the 24 x 7 uptime and accessibility challenges surrounding mission and business critical Tier 0/1/2 data.

Avoiding Solution Bandages
Many organizations utilize storage-array-based snapshot technology to create point-in-time copies to protect and provide online access to data. While snapshot technology provides advantages, fully leveraging these capabilities to meet today’s recovery requirements often introduces a new set of challenges to ensure that copies of data can be managed across tiers of storage and tape to meet retention, cost, and recovery requirements.

Solution “bandages” often involve a combination of creating and maintaining complex scripting, and having to independently manage multiple products and technologies. These technologies can include numerous application-based “Snap-type” management products, data movement technologies, archive, and backup products that are required to ensure data can be moved from tier-to-tier, location-to-location and finally off to tape. Even then, without consistent cataloging and management across disparate storage systems and tape, recovering this data becomes a tedious, manual, time consuming process. Today, administrators with varying expertise are often forced to recover data back across tiers of storage onto production systems and then manually ensure that the application data is in a consistent state and at its most recent recovery point.

The Bottom Line—Operational Benefits and Reduced Costs
SnapProtect™ technology dramatically drives down operational and investment costs associated with the management and protection of critical application data by helping you spend less on storage and admin time. This frees up dollars and your administrators to work on other pressing projects, and you can be assured that your data is fully protected and easily recoverable when needed.

Deduplication

With the introduction of its third generation deduplication solution (Gen 3 deduplication) in Simpana®, CommVault continues to lead the industry in delivering innovative technologies that addresses pressing IT challenges. We have fully integrated both source and target-side deduplication into our unified data management solution to provide best-in-class performance to dramatically reduce time-to-backup and the impact on your overall environment.

Source-side deduplication eliminates redundant backup and archive data at the client before sending it across networks, servers and storage. Users can easily extend deduplication reduction globally, across thousands of clients having different retention requirements. This all adds up to shorter backup windows, lower management costs, and more robust, reliable data protection. Typical benefits of our Gen 3 deduplication capabilities include:

• Cut your backup window by finishing jobs faster.
• Transfer 90 percent less data across the network.
• Maximize data reduction by deduplicating data globally across hundreds of clients in different locations with different protection policies.
• Scale out easily and cost effectively with open systems hardware.
• Deduplicate into the cloud or to tape to reduce retention costs.
• Small and large data sets in remote offices and large data centers are covered.
• Simple management - use a simple check box to switch between source and target-side deduplication to meet business needs.

Bridge the Gap between a Quick Fix and Real Improvement

Deduplication is often viewed as a quick fix to complex protection and recovery challenges that arise from rapid data growth, shrinking operating windows, and very aggressive recovery SLAs. Businesses that use deduplication as a band-aid, often in the form of an appliance, quickly realize that they have temporarily addressed data reduction on disk but later face additional hardware and operational costs as more and more appliances must be procured. Even more importantly, administrators often find they have made zero impact on reducing backup times.
In nearly every situation, there is a significant gap between a short-term fix to explosive data growth and achieving real improvement. These improvements are found in the form of higher performance, smaller operating windows, faster recovery, lower costs, scalability, security, minimal management, and ease of use.

Real improvement requires an approach that is not an afterthought, but an integrated part of a modern data management solution. CommVault was the first backup software provider to fully integrate deduplication into a single software solution. Building on its leadership in this area, Simpana 9 software expands deduplication benefits to address real bottlenecks by bringing efficiencies as close to the source as possible. The third generation of CommVault deduplication is designed to reduce data at the source, use fewer network resources, dramatically shorten backup windows, and eliminate the lock-in associated with appliance based approaches.
Simpana 9 deduplication applies data reduction where the bottleneck actually is, at the source. More importantly, source-side deduplication is not limited to small data sets or remote sites, but can be applied against even the largest data sets. If target-side deduplication is required to meet business needs, administrators have the flexibility to select this approach by simply disabling a check box. Furthermore, Simpana software continues to be the only solution that provides integrated deduplication to tape, allowing businesses to take advantage of tape media for long term retention.

Simpana 9 third generation deduplication is a unique and highly scalable combination that is built on a truly unified platform. Users can significantly improve their backup performance and protect themselves from the perils of hardware vendor lock-in. They can also expect to reduce the amount of backup and archive data stored to disk, tape, or the cloud by as much as 90 percent. They will be able to do this easier than ever because data reduction is fully integrated into the fabric of Simpana 9.

Replication

The ability to access data is core to the success of business today. Simpana® Replication software enables you to create replica copies of production data quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively, using a combination of host-based replication and snapshot technologies. These copies of data can be immediately accessed for rapid recovery, be used to create multiple recovery points or to perform traditional backups without impacting server performance. Resuming business with minimal loss of data and being able to create multiple “points-in-time” during the normal business day enables business to get back to business with minimal disruption.

Data Replication: The Business Challenge
Exponential data growth, together with limited bandwidth, strained resources, tighter budgets and few protection options impede your ability to meet backup windows, ensure data protection and expedite recovery. As data spreads to the edge of your infrastructure it becomes increasingly difficult to access primary data and move it efficiently among storage systems, sites and operating platforms.

Meeting the Disaster Recovery Challenge Head On
Simpana Replication software helps meet service level agreements for protection and recovery by enabling you to create secondary copies of production data quickly and efficiently.
Simpana Replication software delivers the following capabilities designed to help you reliably and cost effectively access and protect data growing from the datacenter to the edge of your infrastructure.

• Meet Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives (RPO/RTO) without taking production systems offline by leveraging continuous capture byte-level replication to continuously protect your data
• Eliminates the risk of application corruption by recovering your file or application to a specific point-in-time
• With remote data replication, data and applications can be reliably protected with replica copies at the central site for Disaster Recovery
• Eliminate exposure from site disaster, costly off-site tape storage and lower TCO by leveraging remote or virtual sites for disaster recovery

Information Mining using Disaster Recovery Copies

Bottom Line – Providing Disaster Recovery Solutions to Meet Critical Business Need
Use Simpana Replication software to ensure RTO/RPO objectives can be met for your business. Improve the overall efficiency of DR operations, reduce impact on your network infrastructure, and enhance your back to business strategies with more point in time recovery options in the event of system failures or data corruptions. Using Simpana Replication software as a core component of your overall data protection strategy and capitalizing on the superior Simpana platform enables you to take control of your operational costs and improve overall business agility.

Disaster Recovery

CommVault® Solution
CommVault® Simpana® Replication software offers a comprehensive set of capabilities designed to make Disaster Recovery easy, cost-effective, and efficient. With CommVault® software, you can eliminate the risk of data loss and service interruptions by replicating data to an off-site location at the moment it is created.  This approach, known as electronic vaulting, is useful for protecting mission–critical data and for environments that cannot tolerate data loss or interruption of service to users in the event of a disaster.

CommVault® Replication software delivers the following capabilities designed to help you reliably and cost effectively maintain business continuity:

• Eliminate the risk and cost associated with offsite disaster recovery by replicating data and applications over a WAN to remote or virtual sites
• Reduce TCO by eliminating duplicate hardware at DR site as well as offsite tape storage 
• Reliably protect and recover  applications with consistent point-in-time images of application
• Expedite recovery with online copy

SRM

CommVault® Simpana® Storage Resource Management
CommVault Simpana Storage Resource Management (SRM) software analyzes, discovers, tracks, trends, and reports on physical and virtual storage usage. SRM provides unparalleled insight into data across file systems, applications, databases and geographies, all from a single console.  Simpana software is the industry’s only SRM solution that is fully integrated into backup and archive operations, making the use and deployment of SRM fast and simple, with no additional training required. CommVault’s integrated approach also means you can leverage existing technology to modernize antiquated manual reporting processes. Simpana 9 delivers detailed analysis, reporting, trending, and chargeback across the enterprise. With an accurate view of storage utilization across the enterprise, you can make informed decisions that translate into real business value.

SRM Benefits:

• Analyze and view physical and virtual storage utilizations and maximize their usage.
• Make informed decisions on how best to deploy an application in a virtualized environment.
• Identify stale data and make informed decisions on your archiving rules and storage policies.
• Leverage file-level analytics for physical and virtual environments.
• Reclaim physical and virtual storage capacities using integrated archiving actions within SRM reports.
• Produce chargeback reports based on physical and virtual machine capacities.

Cloud Storage Integration

From a single console, Simpana® software seamlessly extends local backup and archive to a tier of cloud-based storage solutions. Virtually unlimited storage capacity from our integrated cloud storage partners helps users dramatically reduce costs and operational complexity while improving long-term compliance.

Cloud data storage delivers compelling economics to any IT environment struggling with data management. Because cloud storage providers leverage multi-tenant architectures, infrastructure costs are shared across many users. This helps lower costs substantially versus on-site solutions, which require additional provisioning, power, cooling costs, and more.
CommVault has integrated with cloud storage providers using a native REST/HTTP interface to deliver seamless data and information management across on-site and cloud-based storage architectures. With its single-platform, modular approach to data management, Simpana software offers unique value with cloud storage. Integrated features like deduplication and encryption make Simpana software very efficient for moving backup and archive data across a network for long-term cloud storage solutions. Integrated alerting, reporting, and data verification functionality help ensure that data has safely reached the cloud—without the risk associated with manual scripting or standalone gateway appliances.

Simpana software delivers these benefits while overcoming common concerns with cloud storage:

• Simpana software’s embedded encryption secures data backup and archive data in-flight or stored within cloud storage
• Based on typical use cases, data deduplication can help customers reduce cloud-storage-related costs by up to 75 percent with embedded compression and deduplication, which reduces the data footprint before it is sent over the network and stored in the cloud
• Simpana software’s native REST connectivity seamlessly integrates Simpana modules with cloud data storage, eliminating disparate cloud gateway appliances and complex scripting
• Built-in reporting, alerting and data verification features in Simpana software ensures data is where it is supposed to be

Extending Singular Information Management® to Farline™ Storage “in the Cloud”

While many organizations benefit today from keeping online, deduplicated data copies available for fast recovery, data growth will still require more disk and tape to contain exploding amounts of data. Cloud storage introduces a new ‘Farline’ tier that enables several new compliance, disaster recovery, and data backup solutions. More readily available than offline vaulted data, Farline cloud-based storage delivers these key use cases to help solve today’s data management problems:

• Tiering data retention to Farline storage, avoiding the need to expand data center capacity or operational costs
• Archiving stale data to cloud-based storage to free up existing space within the data center
• Cost-effective Disaster Recovery for Small-and-Medium Enterprises without large upfront and operational investment
• Content indexing data before moving to cloud to meet Compliance requirements and minimize search/retrieval times during eDiscovery operations
• Remote office backup directly to cloud-based Farline storage

Archive

Overcome Challenges

With Simpana software, you can overcome today’s biggest challenges related to storage growth and information retention, including:

• Balancing long-term retention of information with bottom line economics
• Controlling escalating costs to manage primary data
• Adhering to ever-changing legal and compliance requirements

The CommVault Simpana Data Archiving Solution Benefits include:

• Reclaim primary storage, manage data retention and address Information Governance needs.
• Eliminate 90% of redundant data with integrated global deduplication and compression, saving on network, media and storage costs.
• Provide visibility with non-intrusive data collection from physical and virtual environments with integrated Storage Resource Management (SRM).
• Enforce retention and disposition policies to meet policy requirements and reduce risk.
• Enable a proactive and legally defensible information management strategy from a common interface.
• Allow seamless migration of archived data into public or private clouds.

The Bottom Line
CommVault Simpana software helps control data growth and infrastructure costs while reducing risks associated with information governance.

Storage Optimization

CommVault® Simpana® Solution
CommVault helps you gain proactive control over rising storage costs with our revolutionary Simpana software. Our “singular” approach allows you to reduce and optimize primary storage across heterogeneous platforms, extending the life of existing storage systems and reducing the time required for data protection. A tiered storage architecture allows you to retain the information you need for longer periods, while simplifying the ability to search and retrieve it.

Key Benefits of Optimizing Storage

• Manage data from physical and virtual storage through its entire lifecycle across tiers of storage, tape and into public or private clouds.
• Optimize storage capacity for long-term retention, delivering superior TCO while minimizing risk.
• Eliminate 90% of redundant data with integrated global deduplication and compression, saving on network, media and storage costs.
• Reclaim primary storage.
• Integrate Storage Resource Management (SRM) into archive and backup operations to centralize reporting and improve decision making.
• Cut overall storage costs in half to improve operational efficiencies and optimize productivity.

Virtualization

With the capability to protect hundreds of virtual machines in minutes, virtual machine auto-protection, and the scalability to protect thousands of virtual machines, Simpana® virtual server backup software sets a new standard for virtual server data protection.

• Protect hundreds of virtual machines in minutes
• Scale seamlessly to provide end-to-end protection for thousands of virtual machines
• Automatically discover and protect virtual machines
• Granular file and full VM recovery
• Capture multiple recovery points in a day with minimal production impact
• Create fast secondary and DR copies using embedded deduplication

Simpana® Software is the Data Management Solution that Bridges your Virtual and Physical Environments
Simpana® software is the only data management and data protection solution that delivers end-to-end data protection for both physical and virtual server environments. Simpana software delivers the performance, manageability and scalability to give you the confidence that you can run even your most mission critical applications on virtual servers and be assured that your data is fully protected and easily recoverable when needed.

With high server consolidation and the resulting increased data density per physical host, the old protection strategy of moving data from one place to another simply does not work. No matter how efficiently done, there is nearly not enough time to copy all the data and yet allow the short RPO and RTO that businesses increasingly demand. A data center redesign based on virtualization requires a rethink of data protection strategies. CommVault offers an award winning single data management solution that bridges the gap between the legacy data protection methodologies of the past and the modern data protection techniques that help realize maximum efficiencies in the virtual data center.

Protect 500 Virtual Machines in 17 Minutes using SnapProtect™ Technology
Simpana software and SnapProtect™ for Virtual Server Agent delivers the performance needed to protect even the largest, most demanding virtual server environments. Create rapid-fire, persistent, recovery copies leveraging hardware-based snapshot capabilities built into modern storage systems. These hardware snapshot-based recovery copies are created in minutes with minimal impact on production systems, thus allowing protection for even the largest virtual environments. Real tests have demonstrated that 500 virtual machines can be protected in 17 minutes with this approach, providing unparalleled scale.

• Create Protection copies in minutes – minimal load on production servers and virtual machines.
• Multiple recovery points per day – recover to a few hours ago, not to last night’s backup, minimizing data loss and risk to your business.
• Storage Independent1 – supports wide variety of storage arrays for operation consistency across storage types.

Secondary DR copy with embedded Deduplication
Retaining too many snapshots on storage arrays can be expensive in terms of disk utilization. Simpana software solves the problem by allowing contents of selective hardware snapshots to be copied over to a low cost disk in deduplicated form for DR and long term retention.

• Leverage vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) – create secondary deduplicated copies from select snapshots, with zero impact on production physical hosts or virtual machines.
• Change Block Tracking (CBT) – create incremental backup copies from snapshots using CBT.
• Achieve long term retention – create deduplicated copies on cloud storage or on tape in independent version form.

The Most Advanced Recovery Capabilities Anywhere
Recover individual files, or entire VM-images from the same single-pass backup operation. Granular recovery is available from a snapshot copy or from the secondary copy on disk2.

Leave No Virtual Machine Unprotected
Simpana software delivers Auto-Discovery and Auto-Protection capabilities to ensure all virtual servers are guaranteed protection. Lacking auto-discovery, users waste a lot of time daily, trying to identify new VMs, locate their owners, determine protection needs and add them to the appropriate policy.

With Auto-Discovery, new VMs are automatically assigned to an appropriate protection policy based on pre-defined business rules. A default catch-all policy protects even those VMs that do not meet the pre-defined criteria. This Configure and Forget flexibility allows administrators to be highly productive and focus on solving real business problems, rather than wasting time on unproductive tasks.

Support for multiple virtualization platforms
Simpana software supports protection of virtual machines on the following virtual platforms3

• VMware vSphere
• Microsoft HyperV
• Citrix XenServer