CommVault Says
-- Recent Global Successes Highlight Emerging Trend As CommVault QiNetix Data Management Suite Wins Converts --
OCEANPORT, N.J. — July 26, 2005 — CommVault®, a provider of Unified Data Management™ solutions, today showcased a number of its new clients that have made the decision to switch from their existing information backup systems and adopt CommVault's Unified Data Management suite.
"There are too many enterprises out there that are challenged with their existing backup solutions," said Bob Hammer, CommVault's chairman and chief executive officer. "They're experiencing extraordinarily long sessions, 'time-outs,' system shutdowns and more. They feel limited by systems built with point products that lack the ability to seamlessly scale and integrate into an overall data management system. This can make daily tasks not only difficult, but also time-consuming and expensive. These companies have learned that there's a better way than settling for solutions that are not flexible and responsive to today's data-centric corporate environments. We are grateful for the opportunity to get to know them and develop a solution for their needs, and for the trust they have placed in us."
Among CommVault's new clients are four companies with critical data management needs that have made the decision to quit fighting with their existing backup systems and switch to CommVault QiNetix:
Northern Marine Management is headquartered in Clydebank, Scotland with offices in Aberdeen, Houston, Manila, Mumbai, New York, Rio, Rotterdam, and Singapore as well as a highly mobile client base of 120 ships, ferries, tankers and drilling platforms worldwide to which it provides a comprehensive range of ship management services. The company has to maintain, store and backup e-mails across disparate e-mail systems throughout its client base (more than 1,000 daily e-mails per vessel), comply with international legal regulations (including the requirement that all data be securely stored for seven years), and enable data communications across mobile devices and a range of in-vessel IT infrastructures.
"The complexity of our data environment is immense and it's changing constantly," said Sharon McLaughlin, IT manager of Northern Marine Management. "Our legacy backup system was impossible to reconfigure on the fly to respond to changes in our clients' operations and there was no real central point of control. It had become one of our largest IT headaches."
In response to these needs, Northern Marine Management installed CommVault's Galaxy in both its onboard and onshore networks where it has become an integral part of the company's backup solution for Exchange 2003, 2004 and Microsoft Windows NT and for devices ranging from mobiles to mainframes.
"With Galaxy we've got all of our global resources accessible through one common interface that enables complete data protection on a 24/7 basis," said McLaughlin. "Processes like restore have been reduced from six hours to 30 minutes and it has given us complete control of our e-mail data backup from the servers to tape across heterogeneous platforms. Galaxy has helped us reduce the complexity in our data center."
Airservices Australia is a government-owned corporation responsible for managing airspace covering 51,786,992 square kilometers - approximately 11 percent of the world's total airspace. It also is responsible for the provision of air traffic and navigational services and associated aeronautical information required by both the domestic and international aviation industries.
The 2,900 staff work from installations spread over 600 sites in Australia that include 26 air traffic control towers, two control centers based in Melbourne and Brisbane, and 17 aviation rescue and fire stations at Australia's busiest airports.
Initially, Airservices Australia operated an Open VMS system, but now works in a variety of environments. As a result of its mixed computing environment and its rapid server growth — now numbering some 200 supporting a variety of business systems — Airservices has experienced logistical backup problems.
When Airservices rolled out Microsoft Windows in seven offices, the organization needed a backup solution that would move it away from its VMS legacy system. To find the right answer, Airservices' IT department carried out an analysis and compared multiple vendors.
The ability to do granular level restores of Exchange objects — finding 'that specific e-mail' — was an important need and a significant selling point for CommVault Galaxy.
"Trying to find and restore individual e-mails by restoring an entire Exchange database also would have been very costly," said Craig McGill, Storage Services manager at Airservices Australia.
Airservices was impressed with the functions and features of the CommVault system, including the multi-platform and multi-vendor format, and the quick responses to enhancement requests. "CommVault Galaxy has been simpler to install and operate than expected. The software download is easy and the data planning and data path works effectively," McGill noted.
McGill also described some other benefits, "While Airservices used to have tape drives everywhere, we now have a centralized tape library. There also have been time savings in managing backup and less physical problems with space and weight."
Fleishman-Hillard, Inc. is a global communications agency with offices in 59 cities around the world. The company's 2,000 employees rely on the quality of its data to address a wide range of client needs, from new product introductions and marketing promotions to crisis management. Fleishman-Hillard staffers need connectivity not only from their desks, but also from clients' offices, at events, on the road and at home.
The firm's current data management process utilizes a variety of tape devices and media attached to several servers around the world. Backups occur during non-business hours and individuals at multiple separate locations rotate the tapes daily.
As its network has grown, the company's backup software has struggled to keep up with an average data load of four terabytes per day.
"We were spending too many hours every day changing tapes and verifying backups," said Kathy Forrester, Fleishman-Hillard's chief information officer. "Backups were running more and more slowly, and restores were sometimes taking a day and a half. Our data is our lifeblood; we need it to be both protected and available."
Fleishman-Hillard has turned to CommVault's Galaxy product for its backup and restore functions as well as its disaster recovery features. The company expects to save money and complete backups and restores faster and more flexibly than before as backups will occur continuously across the network to a centralized location. The company also will be able to replicate data several times a day to an off-site data center as part of its disaster recovery plan.
"Once we fully deploy Galaxy, we expect it to save us staff time, tape costs and hardware costs," said Forrester. "Processes that currently take a day or longer will take minutes with Galaxy. That's an important advantage as we continue to support our counsellors and our clients on a global scale."
Marketing Architects provides proven radio solutions for its media and direct response advertiser partners. By delivering unique incremental and non-traditional revenue sources to its radio affiliate partners, the company creates an inventory of efficient media that, when connected with its insightful planning, creative and telemarketing services, drives profitable results for its response-driven advertiser partners.
In mid-2004, Marketing Architects updated its distributed annotation system (DAS) server architecture with new storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage subsystems. Though the upgrade resulted in a significant license renewal expense with its backup provider, the company soon realized that it needed to make a change.
"Weekly full backups were taking 70 hours, and most of the time, the software would 'time out' and shut down before it completed the job," said Dan Gronseth, Marketing Architects' chief technology officer. "We realized that the new storage system was just going to make this bottleneck worse."
Marketing Architects found what it needed in CommVault's Galaxy backup software. The benefits of switching were so great that Marketing Architects jumped immediately to Galaxy from its former backup provider.
"It made sense on a cost basis. Backup sessions have been cut down by 70 percent," said Gronseth. "Galaxy also has a number of features that are very attractive to us, such as its quick, single-message restore and the ability to assign employees personalized access rights so that they can restore their own files without calling our help desk."
With its unique, unified platform, CommVault offers its customers a solution to meet their IT needs immediately, fully integrate with existing backup and recovery systems and seamlessly scale with the organization as it grows. Find out what CommVault can do for you; visit www.commvault.com or e-mail us at info@commvault.com.
About CommVault
CommVault® provides Unified Data Management™ solutions for high- performance data protection, universal availability and simplified management of data on complex storage networks. The CommVault® QiNetix™ platform, based on CommVault's Common Technology Engine, integrates Galaxy backup and recovery, point-in-time replication, hierarchical storage management, archiving for compliance, service level management and storage resource management software solutions. The QiNetix unified approach allows customers to add/integrate QiNetix components, at a fraction of the time, effort and money required by separate point products. Information about CommVault is available on the World Wide Web at www.commvault.com or by calling (732) 870-4000. CommVault's corporate headquarters is located in Oceanport, New Jersey in the United States.
©2005 CommVault Systems, Inc. CommVault Systems, CommVault Galaxy, CommVault QiNetix, DataMigrator, DataArchiver, QNet, CommServe StorageManager, MediaAgent, iDataAgent, CommCell and the CommVault logo are trademarks and may be registered trademarks in some jurisdictions of CommVault Systems, Inc.