Even as interest by small and midsize enterprises (SME) in cloud computing and cloud storage continues to swell, the last thing any SME wants is a solution that introduces more complexity into its environment. Rather solutions are needed that automatically plug into the cloud and take advantage of the features that it offers. Those SMEs who have this prerequisite are advised to take a look at CommVault and the latest integration it offered up last week for the cloud and cloud providers.
A recent study by the Aberdeen Group concluded that organizations pursuing cloud strategies are able to realize significant savings including up to 20% reductions in administrative costs as compared to non-adopters. The caveat according to one article is, however, that in order for organizations to realize these savings is they must “develop appropriate support resources such as a formal cloud computing team.”
While creating teams may be entirely appropriate for enterprise organizations, an SME does not have that luxury. If anything, its entire “cloud computing team” may consist of the individual reading this particular blog entry. So when an SME considers any type of solution that includes the word “cloud” in it, the solution better bundle cloud support with it.
These concerns that SMEs have about seamlessly implementing cloud technologies are largely what CommVault sought to put to rest by making three enhancements to its Simpana offering.
First, Dell and CommVault announced the availability of the new Dell PowerVault DL2200 backup appliance powered by CommVault with Simpana® 8. This appliance introduces new hardware features that you might expect such as the ability to scale to over 300 TBs of storage capacity and 2.4Ghz Intel Xeon processors so it can achieve up to 3 TBs/hour of deduplicated throughput when doing weekly backups.
But as it pertains to the cloud the DL2200 also packages the latest CommVault extensions to the cloud that make moving data to the cloud the turnkey experience that SMEs need in order to make their implementation of cloud technologies a practical reality. The cloud extensions enable DL2200 users to store and/or retrieve their archival or backup data with cloud providers such as Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Nirvanix, EMC Atmos, RackSpace, and Iron Mountain.
In that same vein, CommVault also announced Simpana’s support of the Mezeo Cloud Storage platform that may be run on any server and storage hardware. What makes this integration of special interest to SMEs is that they are often accustomed to working with trusted partners and may want to store their corporate data with that partner, not with some cloud storage provider with a far-off data center.
Mezeo gives these partners the ability to economically build out their own cloud storage solution. In so doing, SMEs have the confidence that their data is being stored with someone they know and trust. Further, their partners can provide cloud storage at a price point that SMEs can afford and do so in such a way that they can still show a profit in providing this service.
But with CommVault making it easy and affordable for SMEs to store data to the cloud with almost any provider, SMEs are also beginning to see the potential of doing recoveries in the cloud. As server virtualization has made it relatively easy and inexpensive for service providers to create virtual machines (VMs) on the fly, smart SMEs recognize it only makes sense to recover applications and maybe even their entire data center at the cloud service provider’s site should the need arise.
This goes to the heart of the third announcement that CommVault made in conjunction with RackSpace. RackSpace already uses CommVault to protect and manage the data on 45,000 of its servers with about 24 PBs of data now under CommVault’s management.
CommVault and RackSpace have now extended this relationship to jointly validate a solution that enables RackSpace subscribers to fire up one or more servers at RackSpace’s data center, recover their data using CommVault to these servers at RackSpace’s site and bring the application(s) back online.
This avoids the need to recover all of the data across the wire or send tapes and/or CDs with data back to the SME so the application server can be recovered. In so doing, this reduces recovery times from days or even weeks to hours or at most a day depending on the scope of the recovery. Further, now that this is validated with RackSpace, there is nothing to preclude other cloud service providers from eventually offering similar capabilities.
Every SME wants to introduce the benefits of the cloud into their environment but they want to do so without the creating more complexity or work. These three enhancements to CommVault Simpana take SMEs a long ways down that road. SMEs get native cloud integration with a number of cloud storage providers, the door is opened for someone they know and trust to provide an economical cloud storage offering for them, and faster, offsite recoveries are now a feasible option.