Nearly every organization is embarking upon backup redesign initiatives in their ongoing efforts to create virtualized data centers, achieve near-instantaneous application backups and recoveries and meet heightened user expectations. But standing in the way of this progress is their inability to cost-effectively provide the expertise and 24X7 coverage that this emerging backup infrastructure needs. It is this gap that the CommVault Remote Operations Management Service (ROMS) has been closing since its introduction in 2009. As it does, it is raising the bar in terms of how enterprise will measure the delivery of service and support offerings going forward.
The Backup Redesign Balancing Act
Backup redesign has once again shown up near the top of The InfoPro Wave 13 heat index with nearly 30% of users naming it as one of their top storage initiatives for 2010. Organizations continue to list disk-based backup in its three primary iterations (deduplication, replication replacing backup software and VTLs) as a storage technology that they anticipate impacting their storage architecture this year.
Yet tiered storage build outs, technology refreshes, consolidations and server virtualization are other initiatives that these organizations are also looking to deploy. These technologies put strains on existing backup designs plus they need their own set of organizational resources to service and support them. So for organizations seeking to justify and balance the deployment of a backup redesign solution with these other priorities, they need a backup solution that meets the demands of these other initiatives without introducing its own set of services and support overhead.
CommVault Simpana with ROMS
Those who are familiar with CommVault® Simpana® software already know that it offers a singular, integrated approach for protecting data in the virtualized data center of tomorrow. Archiving, backup, compression, deduplication, eDiscovery, replication, search and server virtualization data protection are just some of the features that it now supports in anticipation of these emerging needs.
But since the introduction of ROMS in 2009, CommVault has been raising the bar for the delivery of services and support for CommVault users.
One of the key changes that CommVault ROMS makes to the services and support model used by its competitors is its introduction of real-time monitoring and management. The monitoring and management of an organization’s CommVault implementation are performed by trained CommVault engineers who typically work for a value added reseller (VAR) or even CommVault.
To accomplish this level of integration, monitoring and management, ROMS runs as a native service on the CommVault Simpana CommServe backup server so it can take advantage of its security privileges. It uses these permissions to directly communicate with Simpana’s Common Technology Engine (CTE), gather information and then send it offsite.
It is because this level of security exists that organizations can grant either a trusted partner or CommVault itself the appropriate level of permissions so they can in real time leverage ROMS to access, monitor, manage and service an organization’s backup environment.
ROMS Brings the Cost Justification to Backup Redesign
The native integration that ROMS has with Simpana delivers the immediate as well as the long term dollar savings that enterprises are looking for so they can justify proceeding with their backup redesign initiatives.
Absent a feature like ROMS, enterprises may need to add up to 2 – 3 full time employees (FTEs) to manage and support a central backup redesign architecture such as what CommVault supports. Even then these individuals will not be CommVault experts as they generally must call upon either their VAR or CommVault support for any sophisticated issue that they encounter or need to resolve.
Using CommVault ROMS changes the structure of the services and support model in two important ways.
First, enterprises do not need to dedicate FTEs to monitor and manage their backup environment. ROMS enables them to outsource the monitoring and management of their backup environment to either a VAR or CommVault who can monitor and manage this environment. Since CommVault support is available 24×7, 365 days a year, organizations do not necessarily need to retain FTEs to monitor and manage their backup environment.
Second, the average cost of ROMS for many of these environments starts in the $2500 – $5000 per year range. This price range generally includes a sufficient number of licenses for organizations to use ROMs to monitor and manage their most mission critical application servers with the flexibility to add more ROMS licenses if needed. This is a fraction of the cost of what it might cost an enterprise to hire staff to manage this backup infrastructure.
Proactive Backup Infrastructure Optimization Gives ROMS Teeth
Monitoring and managing backups is great but what gives ROMS its teeth is its ability to move an organization to the next level by providing them the information they need to proactively optimize their backup infrastructure.
Using ROMS means organizations no longer necessarily have to wait until a backup job or tape drive fails. Because of the tight integration that ROMS has with CommVault Simpana and its CTE, any disk or tape device managed by Simpana can be rendered by ROMS. This eliminates the need for ROMS to use MIBs and traps to gather information associated with each physical device.
Now by simply querying Simpana for the information it needs when it needs it, it is very straightforward for ROMS to pull back that information. Once ROMS has it, ROMS can then use it to monitor the health and efficiency of the entire backup ecosystem as well as analyze errors so it can predict when a backup job or tape drive is prone to fail.
In the case of tape libraries, anyone (local or remote) who is using ROMS can administer it. Once a tape library is selected, ROMS displays all of the tape drives in the tape library and lets the administrator know their status (healthy, degraded, off-line, etc.)
However ROMS also captures and displays the efficiency level that the tape drive is running at and what errors are occurring. In this way ROMS is more than just another backup reporting tool.
While ROMS captures how much data is protected, how fast it is being protected and how reliably it is being protected, it also provides the additional details that organizations need to drive costs out of their backup infrastructure.
For instance, using ROMS an organization may ascertain that tape drives are being written to inefficiently or experiencing a large number of errors and then proactively take steps to optimize their backup environment. In this example correcting these problems may include increasing the number of backup jobs executing concurrently or replacing the tape drive that is experiencing errors.
CommVault ROMS Extends the Customer Satisfaction Experience to Services and Support
The era of backup pain is coming to an end in large part because of data management software like CommVault Simpana. However organizations still expect to internally handle the service and support their backup infrastructure. Yet many organizations make that assumption simply because it has never occurred to them that services and support can be delivered in another way.
Today’s expanding backup environments are becoming both more complicated and labor intensive to manually manage so it is time to lay the foundation for the automation of backup monitoring and management as well as the outsourcing of services and support. CommVault ROMS with its 700+ customers, 400 customer requested feature enhancements and year’s worth of experience in the field proves that its is well on its way to helping current and prospective customers reset their expectations around how storage providers deliver service and support.
Organizations using CommVault Simpana as their foundational data management and protection software have for some time been able to confidently manage and protect data in their environment. Now using CommVault ROMS, they can extend these same high levels of satisfaction and savings to the service and support of their backup environment.