Stop The Data Management Insanity: The New Storage Economy

By David West, Vice President of Marketing & Business Development, CommVault

All of the latest recession coverage has storage vendors fixated on talking about how much money they can save budget-constrained IT managers. Too often, unfortunately, this tongue wagging amounts to over-inflated promises that fall flat when it comes to actually reducing hardware expenditures, lowering overhead or producing quantifiable efficiency gains. Why? Because their old-school ways require the constant addition of more hardware, multiple storage products and extra administrative resources.

We are in the new storage economy, where doing more with less means exactly that — start managing your ever-increasing amounts of data with less infrastructure, fewer disks and tapes as well as reduced administration. Our founding principles are rooted firmly in the belief that you can wring cost and complexity out of your existing environment by leveraging a single, unified data management platform. Our philosophy is simple: replace multiple, disparate copies of data with one highly optimized copy that can be easily repurposed and centrally managed for backups, recovery, replication, archiving, deduplication, search, e-discovery and more.

This philosophy has enabled us to continually "walk the talk" of the new storage economy by demonstrating how a single data management approach can produce major economies of scale. With the release today of Simpana 8, CommVault's list of proof points just got longer as we introduce major advances in recovery management, data reduction, virtual server protection and content organization.

Eighteen months in development, this largest release in our company's history emerges with 300 enhancements and 140 new product features–all designed to drive unprecedented cost savings and efficiency gains. I talk to customers and partners all the time. These conversations are important and this release is completely focused on solving their most pressing problems. For instance, global embedded deduplication spans backup and archive copies across disk and tape tiers of storage to reduce tape-based archives by up to 90 percent. Meanwhile, data center efficiencies get a big boost from simplified management of virtualized environments, including new auto-discovery of VMware and Hypervisor clients, along with greater, more granular recovery and backup options.

Automatic classification and categorization of enterprise content is further streamlined with CommVault® Simpana® 8's capability to profile, organize and repurpose content based on defined rule and search patterns. Improved control over new and existing data–regardless of where it originated or now resides–produces substantial savings in search and discovery time and effort.

The best way to reduce costs, increase efficiencies and ensure compliance is to gain a better understanding of how corporate data is stored and managed. By leveraging game-changing functionality, you get a much tighter grasp on your data while cutting costs by up to 40 percent. In future posts, we'll do a deeper dive into how Simpana 8 software is helping companies in today's tough economic climate by embracing our "do more with less" mantra.