We wound down Day 2 of Tech Field Day VFD3 with CommVault reviewing their flagship product Simpana. For those who aren’t already familiar with CommVault, or the Simpana 10 release, it is an incredibly popular product with good reason.
Not just a backup company
With their roots in backup and recovery, it has been difficult for many of us as virtualization admins and data center admins to see beyond the core role that CommVault Simpana provides. Backup and restore capability is obviously a core part of their service offering.
Imaging having de-duplication (source and target), Cloud target, hardware accelerated snapshots, and support in the VMware environment and Hyper-V environment to do machine, volume, and object level archive and retrieval.
Sure sounds a lot like a backup company right? Well, they are, but there is much more to the picture than this core feature set.
End-to-End and the Hybrid Cloud world
Among the features that Simpana offers, they have support for both physical and virtual servers. Tack on policy based backups and tight hypervisor awareness for both VM and vApp protection and then you have a strong case to look at CommVault.
I won’t try to cover all of the feature set here because the real good info will come when you watch the video of our session, but there are many on-premises model protection scenarios and features that Simpana 10 can deal with.
So this is where the next layer comes it!
The hidden gem of Simpana
Well, it isn’t hidden as a feature, but what is often hidden for technologists who evaluate Simpana is the business value that comes from the product in its self-service recovery, and compliance management features. There is also a beautifully crafted orchestration environment built in which lets you run VM lifecycle processes that will neatly integrate in your protection plan.
The lifecycle management also covers conversion of machines using disparate source and destinations which is a rather unique feature offered by only a few protection vendors.
For the organizations that are dealing with compliance requirements for retention, recovery, and legal hold situations, there are some really cool features.
Too much good info to share here, so I would definitely recommend chatting with the team at CommVault to see how it may be a fit. They can be found at @CommVault on Twitter and www.commvault.com for much more info and to pick up whitepapers and goodies.
DISCLOSURE: Travel and expenses for Tech Field Day – Virtualization Field Day 3 were provided by the Tech Field Day organization. No compensation was received for attending the event. All content provided in my posts is of my own opinion based on independent research and information gathered during the sessions.
I have been a CV user at current and previous employer. The software just keeps getting better and the support from CV themselves are pretty dang good. We actually opted out of getting support from the VAR and going straight to CV Support instead. But also our AE/SE team are always checking in and seeing how things are going. Yes a good “partner” will do that too but well after a purchase they still come by to see how we are doing.
All the options that you get with Simpana, it’s all from the same console and not piece milled together from other applications. Few, if any, can say that in DR/BC field.
* I was not paid to sing their praises. 😉
Great to hear Joey! Thanks for the feedback on it. I’ll be sure to spread the word to the folks at CommVault 🙂