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Many of our 10,000+ customers started talking with us in search of a better alternative to their existing backup systems. But, ultimately, they were won over by CommVault’s unique philosophy and ability to deliver complete data and information management solutions with simplicity, infinite scalability and unprecedented control over data and costs.
In 2008, CommVault was one of only two data management software companies to receive a “Positive” rating from Gartner in their Enterprise Backup/Recovery Software MarketScope (no other company rated higher). And leading technology companies worldwide have formed strategic partnerships with us, including Dell, HDS, HP, Microsoft, NetApp, VMware, Novell, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Bull.
A wealth of accolades, and revenue growth greater than 3 times the software industry average further reflect the industry’s burgeoning enthusiasm for CommVault’s revolutionary approach to data management.
CommVault software is one software product with one platform designed to eliminate the need for a myriad of disparate, point-level products, with separate interfaces, hardware infrastructures, training and support requirements, and costs. It is inherently flexible, efficient, scalable and adaptable. And it naturally results in significant cost reductions.
Eschewing the inefficient siloed approach to data management, Simpana software employs licensable modules for Backup, Archive, Replication, Resource Management, and Search—all built from the ground up on a single unifying code base and common platform.
All modules are built in to the Simpana common platform, simply waiting to be turned on if and when you need them. This Solving Forward solution gives enterprise users a truly integrated data management system in place from the beginning.
Because the Simpana common platform was designed to be infinitely scalable, newly developed modules will ”talk” effortlessly to all other Simpana modules for integrated data management far into the future.
The fact that CommVault® software is all built on a single unified platform is not a marketing distinction designed to set us apart from our competitors. It is the foundation of a truly revolutionary data management approach that solves a real problem and delivers real results, helping companies better manage, access, and recover their data—all while reducing costs and risk.
For over 10,000 CommVault customers, these real-world benefits generate demonstrable efficiency and business advantages. For example, ROI analysis shows Simpana® software can reduce storage-related costs—including hardware, personnel, and consumables—by up to 40%.
Our customers experience reductions of up to 90% in off-site tapes and up to 50% of tape drives. Simpana software also virtually eliminates backup windows, and it can reduce backup administration time by an average of 42%.
The dramatic economic and operational value Simpana software delivers to our customers can only be touched upon in a small brochure. Discover what CommVault can solve for you visit www.commvault.com
Contact information
Address
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Telephone: +44 (0)1189 516 500
Email: emeamarketing@commvault.com
Website: www.commvault.com
Press Releases
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Case Studies
CHIVAS BROTHERS BLENDS TOP-SHELF DATA PROTECTION WITH PREMIUM DEDUPLICATION TO SAFEGUARD MISSION-CRITCAL ENETERPRISE DATA
Les Gilfillan, network manager for Chivas Brothers, explains how the company’s focus on innovation extends beyond its production of high-end spirits to leading-edge information systems and data management solutions for supporting more than 1,500 users across 30 corporate sites. “We’re big users of server virtualisation and are always looking for ways to increase operational efficiencies while managing exponential storage growth and protecting vital corporate information.”Customer Profile
Chivas Brothers is the Scotch whisky and premium gin business of Pernod Ricard – the world’s co-leader in wine and spirits. Chivas Brothers is the global leader in luxury Scotch whisky and premium gin with a portfolio that includes includes Chivas Regal, Ballantine’s, Beefeater Gin, The Glenlivet, Royal Salute, Aberlour, Plymouth Gin, Longmorn, Scapa, 100 Pipers, Clan Campbell, Something Special and Passport.
Chivas Brothers can trace its origins to the opening of a high-end grocery store in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1801. During its distinguished history, Chivas Brothers supplied provisions to the Royal family at Balmoral Castle upon Queen Victoria’s first visit to Scotland in 1842. It also created Scotch whisky history when it introduced the world’s first luxury Scotch whisky, Chivas Regal, as a 25 Year Old blend in 1909.
Today, Chivas Brothers operates under the decentralised Pernod Ricard structure that allows for entrepreneurial initiative in each sector and market – where brand owning companies are responsible for defining global strategies and distribution companies implement plans in their markets in conjunction with brand owners.
Chivas Brothers is a leading employer with 1,500 staff across 31 sites in the UK, with headquarters in Paisley, Scotland. Chivas Brothers has 12 operating malt whisky distilleries, a grain whisky distillery, two gin distilleries (in London and Plymouth) and over 300 bonded warehouses, containing an extensive aged inventory of more than six million casks.
According to Les Gilfillan, network manager for Chivas Brothers, the company’s focus on innovation extends beyond its production of high-end spirits to leading-edge information systems and data management solutions for supporting more than 1,500 users across 30 corporate sites. “We’re big users of server virtualisation and are always looking for ways to increase operational efficiencies while managing exponential storage growth and protecting vital corporate information,” he says.
Data Management Environment
A team of approximately 15 people is responsible for overseeing Chivas Brothers’ corporate network, which includes the WAN, LAN, file servers, office applications and PCs. A predominantly Microsoft shop with XP on the desktop, Chivas supports about 150 physical servers running Microsoft Windows 2003 and 2008 as well as another 100 virtual machines running on eight VMware ESX servers, which are dispersed across four main datacentres in Paisley, Dumbarton and Elgin, Scotland as well as Hammersmith, England.
In addition to the full Microsoft Office software suite, the company uses Microsoft Exchange Server for its corporate email system with Active Directory and SharePoint. An Oracle-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system plays a pivotal role in supporting overall operations.
Ongoing business expansion has caused Chivas Brothers’ data storage requirements to surge by more than 30 percent annually. The company relies on a series of HP Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) disk storage systems for handling 19 TBs of production data. Chivas also leverages its HP EVA storage to support a migration to disk-based data protection, which has dramatically increased the speed and reliability of backups and recoveries. “We deployed both disk-based backups and deduplication technology, which enabled us to streamline operations while reducing our overall investment in tape media,” says Gilfillan. “Most important, we now can ensure data integrity for all mission-critical applications.”
Seeking Potent Backup & Recovery
As its data storage requirements grew, Chivas Brothers found it increasingly hard to meet daily incremental and weekly full backup windows. The tape-based systems couldn’t move data fast enough, so backups would run through the weekend and into Monday mornings, which proved problematic. Additionally, the company was investing heavily in tape-based media, since daily incremental and weekly full backups required multiple tapes at both its central and remote locations.
Moreover, tape-based backups took too much time and effort to manage, especially when failed jobs required remote restarts over the weekend. On most days, the backup administrator spent up to half his time overseeing the process and troubleshooting problems.
System administration was further burdened by the need to oversee multiple instances of legacy data management software with separate, decentralized management consoles.
Previously, Chivas Brothers had relied on CA ARCserve and HP Data Protector to handle backup and recovery operations, but found both solutions lacking functionality and ease of use.
Additionally, the team faced persistent issues with recoveries as pulling data from tape could take up to 48 hours once the tape was retrieved from offsite storage and cataloged. “Requiring up to two days to restore important data was unacceptable,” notes Gilfillan. “We knew there was a better way to reduce recovery time and effort.” Chivas Brothers felt the addition of disk would improve backup performance and reliability while reducing operator intervention and decreasing the costs of relying heavily on tape.
To enhance its litigation readiness and meet growing compliance demands, Chivas Brothers wanted to retain more data on disk, but was concerned about the amount of redundant data across core applications, including its Oracle ERP and Exchange systems. Duplicate data slowed backups at its main datacentre and four remote sites. “We wanted to improve the cost, ease of use and reliability of data protection,” adds Gilfillan. “We felt the addition of deduplication would produce significant savings while enabling us to keep more data on disk longer.”
CommVault’s Full Menu of Complementary Capabilities
In searching for a more flexible, resilient data protection foundation, Chivas Brothers reviewed the competitive landscape to determine their preferred deduplication approach. The company looked at EMC Avamar, which they worried would be costly as it required a second solution for archiving data off to tape. Also considered was a virtual tape library (VTL) recommended by HP, but Chivas Brothers found the VTLs to be prohibitively expensive as well
In contrast, Chivas Brothers was impressed with CommVault® Simpana® software, which blended disk-based enterprise backup and recovery with embedded deduplication capabilities. “I really liked CommVault’s integrated deduplication, which seemed much more seamless than EMC Avamar,” notes Gilfillan. “We also appreciated that Simpana software was built to leverage disk storage, whereas others were too focused on making their disks look like tape.”
Chivas Brothers also sought a solution for streamlining business continuity at its remote sites and found CommVault’s Continuous Data Replication (CDR) appealing as it would eliminate tape management at multiple locations. Equally impressive was the full spectrum of functionality, encompassing archiving, enterprise search and other key data management features that CommVault supported in its unified data management platform. “There’s much more to CommVault than just backup,” adds Gilfillan. “The other modules were certainly worth investigating down the line and this element of growth was appealing.”
Chivas Brothers also felt CommVault was well positioned to handle a mixed environment as Simpana software was developed to perform well in physical, virtual and cloud-based environments. CommVault’s ability to deliver end-to-end data protection for both physical and virtual server environments was a major plus as it would enable Chivas Brothers to achieve the performance, manageability and scalability the team required to safeguard all of its mission-critical applications and data, regardless of where the information resided. After reviewing functionality and overall product architecture, Chivas Brothers spoke to several Simpana software customers, which sealed the decision to move forward with CommVault.
Chivas Brothers Toasts Simpana Software’s Modern Data Management
In November 2009, Chivas Brothers deployed Simpana software and began to realize immediate benefits from its modern approach to data management. For instance, the company reports that the combination of disk-based backups and integrated deduplication enabled the company to cut its backup window in half. Oracle ERP backups also have been decreased by 50 percent, which minimizes any downtime of this crucial system.
Reliability of both backups and recoveries has soared. “Simpana backups just work and restores are no longer a case of ‘fingers crossed’ that we can get our data back,” explains Gilfillan. “We have full confidence we can recover what we need quickly and with minimal fuss.”
In particular, the team appreciates the granular restore capabilities for Microsoft Exchange, which enables recovery of individual emails, folders and mailboxes or entire Exchange databases and systems. Additionally, Chivas Brothers takes advantage of CommVault’s embedded deduplication capabilities and reports a reduction of up to 90 percent of backup Exchange data as well as 80 percent of Oracle data stored on disk and tape. “CommVault’s deduplication has exceeded our expectations,” says Gilfillan. “The savings are remarkable—we didn’t expect it to be this good!”
Thanks to impressive data reduction results, Chivas Brothers now retains up to three months of data on disk, which has led to faster recoveries and decreased tape media costs. In most cases, disk-based data restores can be performed in minutes, which is a vast improvement over the 48 hours it took previously. Moreover, the team predicts savings in tape media costs of approximately $32,000 by eliminating incremental backups to tape along with additional savings by deferring replacement of 20 older LTO tape drives.
CommVault’s integrated replication functionality has enabled the elimination of tape-based backups at Chivas’ four main sites. Additionally, the team has been able to reduce the number of remote backup master servers from eight to one, which further streamlines administration while reducing costs. “Previously, we had to log into each remote server to verify backup jobs had run successfully,” Gilfillan notes. “Now, we view everything at once, which saves time and increases the productivity of our staff.”
Chivas Brothers also takes advantage of CommVault’s Simpana software Virtual Server Agent (VSA) to effectively bridge the gap between legacy backup and recovery processes and the newer, modern data protection techniques required to yield maximum efficiencies in a heavily virtualised environment. “One of the areas that really sold us on CommVault over the incumbent and other competitive solutions was the elegant way in which Simpana protects a consolidated virtualised environment,” adds Gilfillan.
With Simpana software’s consolidated management capabilities, Chivas Brothers states that it has lowered administrative overhead by 70 percent. “We replaced multiple instances of legacy data management software with a centralised ‘single pane of glass’ and intuitive graphical user interface,” Gilfillan says. “The administrative savings are significant, which means a lot as we only have one dedicated person overseeing this area.”
In the future, Chivas Brothers is planning an upgrade to Simpana software version 9 so they can take advantage of both source- and target-side deduplication. In bringing source-side deduplication into the mix, the team expects additional performance gains by eliminating redundant data at the client before sending it over the corporate network. Chivas also is exploring the addition of CommVault’s email and file archiving as well as its Remote Operations Management Service, which combines software, systems and personnel to provide managed monitoring of Chivas Brothers’s environment. “I just want to know that my backups have run and there’s no fear factor when it comes to restores,” concludes Gilfillan. “As a proactive partner, CommVault delivers, which gives me complete confidence in the integrity of our enterprise data.”
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Whitepapers
A Better Way to Manage Data in Virtualized Environments with CommVault Simpana Universal Virtual Server Agent
CommVault Simpana Software is a single product that helps you easily control all aspects of data management in virtualized environments for both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware. This includes data protection, archive, replication and reporting – all integrated to deliver a complete virtualization solution managed from a single console.
Virtualization Top Ten Reasons
Top ten reasons to manage data in virtualized environments with CommVault Simpana Software
Virtualization_Top_Ten_Reasons[1].pdf 134.59 kB
Products
Enhanced Protection and Manageability of Virtual Servers
Companies relying on the benefits of virtualized environments to reduce cost and maximize operational efficiencies are often challenged by limited manageability, data protection and disaster recovery options
Enhanced_Data_Protection_and_Manageability_of_VMware_Using_CommVault_Simpana[1].pdf 2.24 MB
Enhanced Data Protection and Manageability of Virtual Servers Using CommVault Simpana Solutions
Scalable Data Protection Options for VMware and Microsoft Virtual Environments
