CommVault Updates Simpana to Version 8

Simpana 8 from CommVault is a major new release of the enterprise data management software. It includes advances in recovery management, data reduction, virtual server protection, and content organization, and is now available.

The breakthrough release helps companies manage larger amounts of data, scale to accommodate an expanding, globally distributed enterprise, and implement cost-saving strategies by offering users new snapshot-based data management, data deduplication, laptop and desktop protection, remote office data management and advanced copy management features.

The new version of Simpana software continues CommVault’s commitment to delivering comprehensive data protection, backup and recovery, and information management capabilities that enable companies to solve key business challenges and transform their enterprise.

Built on the industry’s only truly singular, unified platform, Simpana 8 can meet a broad spectrum of customer’s discovery and recovery management requirements and eliminate the need for a myriad of point level products. Customers gain improved access to more data, simplified data management, rapid recovery, and dramatic improvements in performance, slashing data management costs by up to 40 percent.

The company’s largest software release to date, Simpana 8 culminates 18 months of development and includes more than 300 enhancements and 140 newly added product features. CommVault has filed over 50 U.S. patent applications related to Simpana software and its 8.0 release.

"Simpana 8 is radically changing the economics of data management for businesses everywhere," said N. Robert Hammer, CommVault’s chairman, president and CEO. "Today’s economic environment is challenging enterprises to do more with less. Simpana 8 simplifies the way businesses store and manage rapidly growing amounts of data and can help customers ensure compliance, gain operational efficiencies, and dramatically reduce their data management and related storage expenses by up to 40 percent."

Industry’s First Global Embedded Software Deduplication Reduces Up To 90 Percent
of Backup and Archive Data on Tape
With the industry’s first global embedded software data deduplication, Simpana 8 offers a holistic approach to data deduplication that spans both disk and tape tiers of storage. Unlike appliance-based solutions that limit dedupe benefits to the boundaries of the box, CommVault’s unique, end-to-end approach expands the benefits of block-level deduplication across an entire organization’s backup and archive copies, resulting in cost-efficient scaling and performance across the entire data management infrastructure. Data reduction begins at the client and spans through, and includes, off-site tape copies. This holistic approach results in faster network data transfers, shorter backup windows, faster recoveries and a more efficient utilization of the disk infrastructure to support customer recovery SLAs.

Simpana software automatically preserves the compressed state of the deduplicated data as it is transparently migrated to tiers of cheaper storage for longer retention needs. In the face of rising power and cooling requirements and escalating growth rates, deduplication with tape offers a game-changing advantage for customers by reducing the footprint of long-term vaulting or compliance copies by up to 90 percent. This translates into fewer drives, lower maintenance and less critical operating hours used.

New Advanced Protection and Recovery Features
Increase Reliability By Approximately 20 Percent
and Recovery Speeds By Up To 77 Percent
As customers look for ways to manage larger amounts of data and implement cost-saving strategies such as consolidation and virtualization, Simpana 8 introduces new advanced protection and recovery capabilities that are optimized for mission critical systems, help reduce infrastructure complexity, and manage data growth on the edge.

These include:

• New Recovery Capabilities Optimized for Business Critical Information at the Edge: Simpana 8 provides multiple options for protecting business critical data at distributed remote and branch office locations. These solutions facilitate WAN efficient transfers to pass compressed and encrypted data between sites, as well as rapid recovery that helps to minimize the risk and cost of downtime. Centralized, automated policies applied to data residing on workstations and laptops help facilitate compliance and search for rapid eDiscovery of both backup and archive data. End users can also perform their own recoveries, eliminating the need for local administrators and providing further cost savings.
• New Snapshot Protection Capabilities Eliminate Backup Window: New SnapBackup feature integrates seamlessly with hardware-based snapshot technologies to create persistent application and data consistent recovery copies directly from snapshots, bypassing the production server and virtually eliminating the need for an operational backup window. Simpana software removes the configuration and management complexity normally associated with snapshot management, creates a unified policy management framework for multiple pre-certified storage vendors including EMC and NetApp, and offers point and click recovery points from any storage tier (online, nearline, offline).As part of an ongoing certification and integration program, CommVault intends to integrate with and certify additional array-based snapshot vendors including Dell and HDS. Transparent, off-host processing sequences catalog the contents of the snapshot, validate the data and manage the logs to complete the protection and archive process. Data retention policies automatically promote selective copies to nearline/deduplicated stores or offline/vaulted copies while preserving the ability for a point and click simple recovery of the most complex application. New offline mining tools for Exchange, SharePoint and Active Directory complement the SnapBackup feature by extending the ability to recover granular messages and documents directly from database recovery copies.
• Simplified Management of Virtualized Environments: With single virtual client support for VMware’s industry-leading virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure, and Microsoft Hyper-V, Simpana 8 includes a host of flexibility and usability options designed to simplify management of virtualized environments. Auto-discovery helps eliminate time consuming manual processes, while ensuring users meet their protection/recovery service level agreements. Users can conduct backups in an efficient off-host mode to minimize the impact on production and move just the changes to ensure seamless scalability. Additionally, users benefit from a broad range of recovery options from single files to virtual disks to the entire machine; and cross platform restores from virtual systems to physical servers, or across virtual platforms such as converting images between the VMware platform and a Microsoft Hyper-V system.

Content Organization Features Streamline Information Classification of New and Existing Content for Data Retention, Compliance and eDiscovery Operations

• Innovative Content Organization: Simpana 8 provides an innovative enterprise content classification engine that automatically classifies and categorizes content based on defined rules and search patterns. These link to workflow policies that seamlessly profile, organize and repurpose content to meet specific information management tasks, including legal hold for eDiscovery. Information assets are automatically organized into classification groups to provide users with better control over new and existing information. Rather than adopting a costly retention strategy across all data, required data is instead managed, retained and organized to meet specific business requirements, leading to improvements in access, operations and cost savings.
• Advanced Application Integration: Simpana 8 software’s new integrated workflow is designed to target information management processes with leading ECM systems and facilitates intuitive access to unstructured content. Pattern matched information is tagged according to how businesses want to view and organize their information and then placed within desired business taxonomies and records management tools. This allows business users to manage and access governance information themselves, reducing the business risk associated with compliance and potentially saving hundreds of hours while avoiding costly delays by unnecessarily involving administrators in a discovery.

Simplified Purchasing and License Management
Many of the new Simpana 8 features are available in simplified and consolidated pricing bundles aligned to popular use-cases to make configuration and purchasing simpler than ever. Businesses of all sizes – from SMBs to global enterprises to ISVs hosting tens of thousands of clients – will benefit from CommVault’s product licensing. A single, universal electronic key that embeds all licensable options allows customers to centralize license management and deploy agents across the enterprise through a single ‘pane of glass’ interface. Customers can effectively eliminate the manual, system-by-system, feature-by-feature license management and grueling annual audit process required by legacy vendors. CommVault’s new Autoupdate service helps eliminate time-consuming installation tasks, enabling users to automatically install service pack updates or full version license upgrades to reduce operational and administrative burdens.

"Containing costs and maximizing operational efficiencies are top priorities for organizations today. Information spanning multiple storage tiers and in distributed environments creates layers of inefficiency and complexity. Consolidation, especially in a data management solution, creates economies of scale, eases management and lowers operational risk. CommVault Simpana 8 software, with its single platform approach, is a great example of a solution meeting the distributed data demands while reducing operational overhead. Further, and most impressive, is its native, built-in data deduplication feature which optimizes storage capacity across storage silos for all of the data copies made for recovery and long-term preservation purposes," said Lauren Whitehouse, analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.