CommVault announced availability of Simpana 8, a new release of its enterprise data management software, which includes advances in recovery management, data reduction, virtual server protection, and content organization. The company's largest software release to date, Simpana 8 is the result of 18 months of development and includes more than 300 enhancements and 140 newly added product features, CommVault said.
Simpana 8 offers users new snapshot-based data management, data deduplication, laptop and desktop protection, remote office data management and advanced copy management features. The new release seeks to help enterprises better manage enormous volumes of data now being generated within organizations. "People are having a really hard time dealing with the size of the data sets that are out there now," Dipesh Patel, senior product marketing manager at CommVault, tells 5 Minute Briefing. In addition to escalating data volumes, organizations are also extremely budget-conscious, he adds. This combination of concerns, he notes, is "really leading people to talk about data deduplication-how do they physically shrink the amount of data that they have got out there."
Addressing this concern with what CommVault describes as the industry's first global embedded software data deduplication, Simpana 8 offers a "holistic" approach to data deduplication that spans both disk and tape tiers of storage. Data reduction begins at the client and spans through, and includes, off-site tape copies. Simpana software automatically preserves the compressed state of the deduplicated data as it is transparently migrated to tiers of cheaper storage for longer retention needs. In the face of rising power and cooling requirements and escalating growth rates, deduplication with tape offers advantage for customers by reducing the footprint of long-term vaulting or compliance copies.
Additionally, a new "SnapBackup" feature integrates with hardware-based snapshot technologies, CommVault says. This helps create persistent application and data consistent recovery copies directly from snapshots, bypassing the production server and virtually eliminating the need for an operational backup window.
"We are also introducing an agent that can support both VMware and support Hyper-V from Microsoft," states Patel, noting that there are also a number of new options aimed at simplifying management of virtualized environments. Auto-discovery helps eliminate manual processes, while ensuring users meet their protection/recovery SLAs. Users can conduct backups in an off-host mode to minimize the impact on production and move just the changes to ensure scalability. Additionally, users benefit from a range of recovery options from single files to virtual disks to the entire machine; and cross-platform restores from virtual systems to physical servers, or across virtual platforms such as converting images between the VMware platform and a Microsoft Hyper-V system. Simpana 8 also offers multiple options for protecting business-critical data at distributed remote and branch office locations.
For information on CommVault Simpana 8, go here.