Chivas Brothers Selects CommVault Simpana

Chivas Brothers, the producer of Scotch whiskies, has replaced multiple, inefficient backup and recovery products with CommVault Systems, Inc.’s Simpana software to help improve data management operations.

Chivas Brothers is now using Simpana software’s disk-based backup and recovery, deduplication and replication capabilities to modernise and simplify its legacy systems and processes.

Chivas Brothers’ long history of business expansion and growth had resulted in an IT infrastructure composed of multiple physical and virtual servers, various financial applications and information systems and several disparate backup products. These, in turn, made maintaining recovery and management operations difficult and costly. Four remote sites and a heavy reliance on tape further compounded the problem, adding onerous administrative costs to the equation.

The company needed to make improvements in administration, data reduction and operational efficiency. After an review process, CommVault was selected because it offered a highly functional easy-to-use application, mature deduplication with CommVault’s deduplication-to-tape functionality, and broad support for its complex IT environment.

Chivas Toasts CommVault for Modern Data Management

• With Simpana software, Chivas Brothers safeguards vital enterprise information, including Microsoft Exchange and Oracle ERP data. According to the company, it has slashed backup windows in half and decreased their administrative overhead by 70 percent.
• Additionally, Chivas Brothers states that it keeps pace with 30-percent annual data growth by utilising Simpana software deduplication to reduce up to 90 percent of protected data. Now the company can retain up to three months of data on disk for accelerated recoveries and reductions in tape cost.
• According to Chivas Brothers, operations have improved, thanks to reliability of mission-critical backups and restores. In addition, expedited Oracle backups and granular Microsoft Exchange restores maximise the availability of mission-critical data.
• Chivas Brothers reports that CommVault’s embedded data deduplication has exceeded expectations for data reduction while enabling substantial savings in tape media costs by eliminating incremental backups to tape. Additional savings are predicted based on the company’s ability to defer replacement of 20 older LTO tape drives.
• CommVault software’s integrated replication functionality also has let Chivas Brothers eliminate tape-based backups at the company’s four main remote sites. Further cost savings and streamlined administration occurred by decreasing the number of remote backup servers from eight to one.
• In the future, Chivas Brothers plans to take advantage of Simpana software’s source-side deduplication to eliminate redundant client data before it’s sent over the corporate network for additional savings in backup and recovery time and resources.
• A team of 15 people oversees Chivas Brothers’ corporate data network, which spans about 150 physical and 100 virtual servers that support applications and data across 30 corporate sites.

Les Gilfillan, network manager for Chivas Brothers, said:" CommVault backup just works and restores are no longer a case of keeping our ‘fingers crossed’ that we can get our data back. We have full confidence that we can recover what we need quickly and with minimum fuss. CommVault’s deduplication has exceeded our expectations. The savings are remarkable – we didn’t expect it to be this good. We replaced multiple instances of legacy data management software with a centralised ‘single pane of glass’ and intuitive graphical user interface. The administrative savings are significant, which means a lot as we only have one dedicated person overseeing this area. I just want to know that my backups have run and there’s no fear factor when it comes to restores. As a proactive partner, CommVault delivers, which gives me complete confidence in the integrity of our enterprise data."

Chivas Brothers Case Study