Group BAM Ireland Customer of CommVault

CommVault Systems, Inc. announced that BAM Contractors in Ireland, a subsidiary of the Netherlands’ Royal BAM Group and a construction and civil engineering business, is managing data growth, sharing information more efficiently among partners, and mitigating business risk using a modern data management infrastructure based on CommVault Simpana software.

BAM’s use of Business Information Modelling (BIM) generated data growth that demanded a more efficient way to manage, store and access information. In parallel, the organization’s increasingly mobile workforce required anywhere, anytime access to complex models and needed to share important data with business partners.

“We didn’t just want to keep up, we needed to get one step ahead of our data explosion, and quickly,” said Tim McCarthy, IT business manager, BAM Group Ireland. “The investment we made in the Simpana software solution immediately reduced our risk. Our infrastructure is now more resilient and that gives our business a level of assurance in data management that we did not have previously.“

BAM broadened its business model to include facilities management and engineering services, which may contractually require the storage of business data for up to 25 years. Increasing concerns about storage, and the risks associated with data loss, due to the use of disparate products that created data silos across locations resulted in a complete change in the company’s data management processes. By consolidating IT operations in Kildare and implementing a robust new Simpana data management solution, BAM is able to backup to disk and adopt formal, structured, data retention policies. The organization also finds increased business value and flexibility in CommVault’s capacity-based licensing structure, with the ability to scale with anticipated future growth.

“While the entire data consolidation and IT centralization effort projected an approximate 20% annual cost savings,” McCarthy explained, “The investment in CommVault Simpana software wasn’t just about saving money but reducing risk.“

Virtualized infrastructure provides a scalable and agile solution
BAM implemented a virtualized infrastructure at its central site and plans to establish a mirrored environment to provide DR. Simpana software backups all of Kildare’s physical and virtual servers, which support 500 users located in three permanent sites and across approximately 30 construction locations.

CommVault shortens BAM’s backup windows and reduces storage costs by archiving critical application data for SharePoint, Exchange, Autodesk 3D design and an ERP solution to the ContentStore, Simpana software’s integrated virtual data repository, which provides self-service data retrieval. User-defined data retention and recovery policies that reflect the requirements of each business unit or client contract helps BAM to tailor its data management strategies to meet all business needs and avoid unnecessary storage and costs.

In addition to infrastructure cost savings, a single consolidated backup and archive solution also reduces the amount of data that is backed up. With Simpana software’s content indexing feature, BAM can also provide rapid self-service access to both email and project data archives, including SharePoint, making it easier for users to locate critical business information. BAM is now well positioned to respond to mobile user demand to provide access to complex drawings remotely. Going forward, the company also plans to streamline its backup and archive processes by replacing its current email and file archive solution with Simpana software archive.

Philip van der Wilt, VP of EMEA sales, CommVault, added: “The mountain of information that enterprises create is forcing them to rethink how to securely store and retrieve it to unlock more business value. CommVault is helping organizations react faster to business demands while making it easier for them to manage and protect valuable data. BAM is the latest example of how the Simpana single software platform can control storage costs for any infrastructure and reduce corporate risk.“