A data protection solution has many parts. First, obviously, there is the data protection software that moves data from production storage to secondary storage. The software, of course, gets a lot of attention. It has to protect all of an organization’s platforms and provide the required data services. Then the secondary storage hardware is also critical. It has to be able to store backup data in a reliable, cost effective and scalable way. Increasingly, thanks to features like in-place recovery and copy data management, the secondary tier also has to perform well.
While most data protection solutions can write data to almost any type of storage, most organizations leverage data protection appliances that include features like deduplication, compression and scalability. But, the vendors providing these solutions charge a premium over what the storage capacity would cost by itself. And these vendors are under pressure to provide new capabilities and to more tightly integrate with backup software.
At Commvault Go 2016, Commvault is making three significant announcements. First, they are improving and modernizing its graphical user interface allowing role-based presentation. It is also improving on its automation capabilities. And third, it is releasing a software defined storage offering that they call Software Defined Data Services, which is its vision for secondary storage.
Commvault’s incarnation of secondary storage is software-based. It leverages a scale-out file system (Gluster FS) on top of customer provided commodity “white-box” servers. The installation of the software is highly automated making set up of Gluster automated and key Commvault components are installed as well.
StorageSwiss Take
Commvault already has data efficiency capabilities like duplication, now add a software driven scale-out secondary storage tier and they have the ability to change the game. A customer provided secondary storage tier should be less expensive than some of the name brand alternatives. It also, thanks to Gluster, should provide the right amount of performance for recovery in place. Finally, it sets the stage for Commvault to provide the rest of its data management services like copy provisioning, data mobility and others.
Sponsored by Commvault
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
StorageSwiss.com - The Home of Storage Switzerland 