CommVault: Data Protection Meets Search

By Pedro Hernandez

July 09, 2007

Instantaneously finding what you are looking for is a hallmark of today’s search engine powered digital life. However, one of the easiest ways to achieve efficiency, in IT and life in general, is to avoid duplicating work.

These are the philosophy behind CommVault’s Simpana data protection software.

The key to the storage software suite’s backup and archiving smarts is a common software base. Instead lashing together point products under a unified dashboard, Oceanport, NJ-based CommVault built its data protection suite (backup, archiving and replication) on a common software foundation. This means leaner hardware requirements, streamlined administration, and if expanded functionality is required, added features become available at the click of a mouse (and paying the license, of course).

New to version 7.0 of Simpana is Single Instance Store (SIS). Conceived as a way to reduce the amount of storage required for backups and archives, SIS eliminates duplicate files by storing it just once.

For instance, instead of storing a file attachment that was propagated to every member of a department, just one copy is stored, though pointers to that data still render it accessible. What results are better drive utilization and data that is able to hang around longer before being moved to tape, making restores that much faster since only 2 percent of restores take place from backup sets that are 30 days old or more, according to the firm.

Also new in this release is a web-based search, but not just for IT workers.

In a move that blends aspects of storage administration with a dash of business intelligence, CommVault has added a search option that helps both admins and end-users track down files based on their contents. Much like an online search engine indexes Web pages, this option delves into unstructured data held by a long list of popular business file types (370 content types, 77 languages) and serves up relevant results, greatly reducing the need to peek into directories for desired files.

How does business intelligence fit into this?

Still operating on the premise that the best work is that which doesn’t require repeating, CommVault Search lets end-users reference old email, documents, spreadsheets and the like, and use that history to proceed instead of starting from scratch. New projects are then lent some inertia or new hires can hit the ground running. For legal discovery and compliance audits, the option can reduce an otherwise tedious session of digging through data to a simple search.

Simpana 7.0 also gains Microsoft Active Directory support for, among other things, managing access to the new search functionality. For security, there’s the Aux Copy Encryption Enabler, which allows for data to be encrypted during disk-to-disk (D2D) and or disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) — especially handy in the latter case.

Other tweaks include updates to archiving, which gets a boost in the form of IBM Lotus Domino Mail and Microsoft SharePoint support and a broader range of platforms and standards support for the company’s replication technology.

Simpana 7.0 is available now.

 A similar story is also found from this website (posted below):

CommVault launches search and discover software

By Deni Connor

July 09, 2007 (Network World) — Storage management vendor CommVault Systems Inc. introduced an upgrade of its data protection, archiving and replication software on Monday that features new search and indexing capabilities.

CommVault Simpana 6.0, formerly QiNetix, now includes the ability to only store redundant information once; encrypt the data being stored; search, index and access stored data.
Simpana creates a virtual information pool of content-searchable items from files, e-mails and attachments stored across separate backup, archive and online data sets. A smart client for Windows lets users search for and retrieve their own data without the assistance of IT. It eliminates lengthy file-system scans, and crawls and reduces the time for backup and archiving.

For Mark Hurd, network administrator for Cardinal Logistics in Concord, N.C., having users be able to recover data is a huge advantage.

“The feature we are looking forward to using is the Web interface, which lets our users go out and search and see the files that they can recover,” says Hurd. “That way they save me time retrieving and recovering data.”

Hurd installed CommVault’s QiNetix two years ago, after using Veritas Backup Exec for his 600 users.

“With QiNetix [now Simpana], my job went from five hours a day working on backup to three hours a week,” says Hurd.

In addition, Simpana now has single-instance storage capability. In single-instance store, only unique files and attachments across backup cycles and archive sets are stored, resulting in less data being stored and faster recovery of data. Single instancing works either as data is being backed up or after data is stored on disk.

Simpana is tightly integrated with the FAST InStream search and indexing engine. It supports 370 content types and 77 languages. Searching can occur via policies and criteria set by the network administrator or user.

Further, with Simpana, data can be encrypted on the network as it is being backed up, on disk or on tape. Simpana uses AES-256 and Blowfish encryption, and supports LTO-4 tape media.

The CommVault Simpana 7.0 Software Suite is available now.