CommVault Inches Toward Enterprise-Level CDP

With the newest version of its data management product suite, CommVault Systems Inc. is moving one step closer to providing continuous data protection for the enterprise.

QiNetix 6.1 is a comprehensive upgrade, offering more than 100 new features across the six products in the suite—backup and recovery, e-mail archiving and compliance, replication, SRM (storage resource management), HSM (hierarchical storage management), and service-level management and reporting.

All products in the suite use one common technology engine, and the company offers one full-suite upgrade each year. The last update was QiNetix 5.9, released in November of 2004.

With this upgrade, CommVault is moving closer to delivering CDP for the enterprise with a fully unified data management approach, said Chris Van Wagoner, senior director of product marketing.

Making that possible, in large part, is the new CDR (Continuous Data Replicator) component, a byte-level, host-based replication solution that supports enterprise environments by continuously capturing changes in enterprise applications and remote office data.

“Its simple to deploy and offers flexibility in the configuration—one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, etc.,” Van Wagoner said.

CDR also is application-aware and delivers multiple point-in-time consistent recovery points, which help guarantee referential integrity, he said. The component is integrated with Exchange and SQL Server, and offers file-system multiple recovery points.

In addition to offering better protection of remote office data by continuously moving changes to a secondary location with referential integrity, CDR allows lower capital spending and operating IT costs by eliminating the local backup and solid disaster protection caused by continuously moving copies of data off-site, Van Wagoner said.

/zimages/4/28571.gifClick hereto read about Availls expanded CDP backup feature set.

Although CDR isnt CDP in the classic definition of the technology, the addition of the technology to the QiNetix product suite makes sense, said Rhoda Phillips, research manager for storage software at IDC of Framingham, Mass.

“They have set it up to operate more efficiently by capturing changes at a byte level, which means its more granular. That makes it more like a replication product,” she said.

But by integrating CDP-like functionality into the backup process instead of keeping it separate, CommVault is taking steps to differentiate itself from the competition, Phillips said.

CommVault also distinguishes its continuous data recovery solution by tightly integrating it with the companys proprietary Unified Data Management platform, which combines and integrates backup, archive, replication, migration and snapshot capabilities into one platform instead of offering them as separate products. This unified platform allows the company to use one common technology engine, reducing complexity and allowing users to monitor, track, forecast and manage data movement, Van Wagoner said.

/zimages/4/28571.gifRead detailshereabout CommVaults Microsoft DPM support.

The announcement of QiNetix 6.1 is just the first of three announcements the company plans to make by the end of this year. The other two announcements will focus on how the company is improving reliability, performance and supportability for IT operations in high-volume enterprise environments and its plans to provide workable, scalable data life cycle management for larger environments.

Taken together, these announcements signify CommVaults intention to deliver better performance and reliability with solutions based on its unified approach that scale from the smallest to enterprise environments, Van Wagoner said.

Phillips said that with the addition of integrated CDP technology and its upcoming announcements, CommVault may be on to something.

“CommVault is a quiet company thats doing very well,” she said. “Now it looks like it is trying to cover all of the bases.”

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