CommVault Simpana now offering "One Pass"

Today, CommVault is holding a virtual event to announce some of its latest innovations for the Simpana 9.0 product. I had the opportunity to do some early hands-on testing of a few of the new capabilities during an ESG Lab Review — including its new "OnePass" technology and its ability to integrate with Scale-out NAS.

Click here to read the new ESG Lab Report on CommVault Simpana 9.0 "OnePass"

Click here to read a new ESG Analyst Brief on CommVault Simpana 9

With data growing at ever increasing rates, more data sets are simply becoming "too big" to back up — at least not in the traditional sense.  To help combat this, Archive is becoming more and more the steady-partner to Backup, whereby once something is adequately backed up, dormant data can be archived off — making future backups better.

That all sounds like steps in the right direction, but let’s take a look using a "Good, Better, Best" perspective for how these come together:

  Good > Some IT environments are now doing Archive and Backup (and Storage Resource Monitoring), which is solving their tactical backup window and retention challenges — but they are using multiple point products; with each niche technology installing its own agent on the production servers, its own management console, and creating its own I/O/CPU impact on every production server.
   
  Better > Some data protection vendors have either built or bought complementary archiving and/or SRM functionality. Often this eases buying and evaluation cycles, as well as support resolution. But the multiple agents, back-ends, management interfaces, and I/O/CPU impact on the production environments still apply.
   
  Best > One agent … One back-end … One console … and (most importantly) One CPU/I/O stream on each production server.

In other words — One Pass on the data, which (not coincidently) is the name of Simpana’s new feature.

                 CommVault_compare_OnePass_workflows_v3

CommVault may not be the only vendor to have ever converged its software’s methodologies, but it is now on a very short list of vendors who are addressing multiple data management problems with a truly unified solution through an elegant architecture.  And most impressively, they did it while not even asking for new licensing or deployment methods.  That’s right, existing Simpana 9.0 customers can take advantage of this by simply applying the most recent quarterly software update and then doing their normal agent update process.  After that, two simple checkboxes in the Simpana management console will enable the unified "OnePass" behavior within the Simpana system.  (check out the ESG Lab Report on all of this)

While I would love to say that consolidating the 3 workflows of Backup, Archiving, and SRM into one process gives you 3X return for your backup window, there are too many variables to make that claim, including:  file types and size, amount of redundancy, archiving retention rules, etc.   But by only traversing the disk system once (instead of for each of the three processes) every Simpana customer should see an appreciable improvement in backup window SLA compliance, as well as the less quantifiable but more appreciable reduced I/O impact on production disks and networks and CPU — all of which will free the production environment to do less backup tasks and more production work.

As always, thanks for reading.

Click here to read earlier ESG coverage of CommVault Simpana

[Originally posted on ESG at Technical Optimist .com]

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