Commvault's Simpana Tailored for Microsoft Applications and Infrastructure
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Commvault's Simpana Tailored for Microsoft Applications and Infrastructure

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FREMONT, CA: CommVault extended its 15-year partnership with Microsoft to offer new, highly scalable solutions for manageing and protecting data in Hyper-V virtual environments, manageing workloads in Microsoft Azure, and new integration for Exchange, Office 365, SharePoint, and SQL Server applications.



The enhancements to CommVault’s Simpana singular software platform are tailored for Microsoft applications and infrastructure and designed to help enterprises cut costs by up to 50 percent, increase the value of data, drive business efficiencies and reduce risk. They include new capabilities for the management and access of data across the enterprise, from front offices to hosted cloud services, designed for the highest operational efficiency.

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According to N. Robert Hammer, Chief Executive Officer and President, CommVault, said, “Modern enterprises must keep their data operations running and respond quickly to business needs regardless of the size of the company or the vertical industry. Its unparalleled integration and optimization for Microsoft-based IT environments is a key reason why our customer, resellers and service providers trust in CommVault’s long-standing relationship with Microsoft for data management innovations that reduce cost, complexity and risk.”



CommVault’s data management architecture allows enterprises to securely and efficiently discover, protect, manage and create value from data. Simpana software extends Microsoft's built-in archiving support by delivering enterprise-class compliance and eDiscovery features including a single management interface for federated search, legal hold, file and email analytics and content-aware, deep retention. With these capabilities integrated with Windows Explorer, Outlook and other Microsoft applications, organizations can increase the availability of data for analytics, collaboration, cloud-based and mobile applications.



Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft, said, “CommVault’s embrace of Microsoft’s entire stack – application, operating system, and Cloud offerings – provides a 360 degree view of your entire infrastructure. This single view is critical to organizations striving to deliver against the fast-changing business demands for secure and instantly available information. The combination of Simpana and the Microsoft stack gives customers the tools needed to extract value from business data and manage their information more efficiently, whether it resides on physical infrastructure, Hyper-V virtual servers or the Microsoft Azure platform.”



Industry-leading Integration and Optimization for Microsoft-based IT environments



The new updates include automated ways for enterprises and service providers to manage data with deep integration for Microsoft Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V and Azure hosted clouds and broad interoperability and support for Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, SQL Server, SharePoint and Windows endpoint devices.



Simpana software allows users and provider partners to unify data protection operations including backup, archive and Disaster Recovery and move data from on-premises infrastructure to Azure cloud storage easily.



Accelerating Hyper-V Adoption and Extending to Microsoft Azure



Working closely with Microsoft engineers, CommVault introduced enhancements for Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V virtualization that optimize manageability, data availability, storage efficiency and network resources for enterprises and service providers.



The Hyper-V virtual machine (VM) lifecycle management features extend the VM administration to end-users such as application owners or customers in multi-tenant environments, without requiring a call to the helpdesk. On demand, users can automatically provision their own new VMs with CPU, memory and storage resources; apply data protection to new VMs; and access, manage, recover and expire VMs -- all based on pre-defined policies that control usage, cost and retention and managed via a single console.



The block-based tracking support for Hyper-V, also known as changed-block tracking (CBT), enables "incremental forever" backups that minimize the impact on production VMs, reduce network requirements and provide more effective data protection and recovery. Highly scalable data backup architecture that can protect hundreds of Hyper-V VMs in a single node, using the combination of new cluster shared volumes (CSV) proxy backups and an incremental forever methodology. Enhanced CSV support now allows customers to use a proxy node to backup VMs residing on other Hyper-V nodes within the cluster, enabling LAN-free Hyper-V backups and eliminating the backup burden from production server and network resources.



Eliminating Data Silos and Reducing Risk with a Single View of Data



A core component of the Simpana software platform is the ContentStore, which is a single repository of CommVault-managed information for all data on any storage tier from physical to virtualized infrastructure and hosted workloads. The key enhancements to the Simpana software platform today include: the ContentStore Mail which enables organizations to centrally house all Exchange data in the ContentStore repository to essentially create infinite mailboxes. New PST archiving reduces risk by collecting personal message folders for simplified search, eDiscovery and access even if they are stored locally on file shares and endpoint devices. Customers can also securely search and use their archived email through a web console and natively through Outlook. New Office 365 integration allows customers to create on-premises copies of cloud-based files to simplify access and improve search and eDiscovery for legal hold and compliance requirements. Optimized protection for SharePoint supports externalized BLOB storage, which reduces the size of the SharePoint content database and efficiently archives and tiers data. Simpana software protects the entire SharePoint system, from the web farm to sites and documents, including the BLOB storage. New SQL Server 2014 support and simplified protection of SQL Server Always-On configurations reduce the impact to the application server. New Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) integration allows administrators to react faster to issues by managing Simpana software alerts via the SCOM interface. Windows endpoint protection, file sync and upload enable companies migrating their Windows XP client systems to Windows 7 or 8 to use CommVault Edge technology to easily and safely backup, recover and migrate data while maintaining continuous access to information for their mobile workforce. IT departments can wipe data on lost or remote laptops and lock sensitive documents. They can protect files created on tablets and smartphones with the ability to upload specific files to the ContentStore, sync them across devices and securely access and share data through web and mobile tools.



Availability and Time to Value for Microsoft Environments



The Simpana software enhancements are available immediately worldwide in the most recent Simpana 10 release directly from CommVault and its global channel network of PartnerAdvantage resellers, distributors, OEM and servicer provider partners.



CommVault Services are also immediately available to help customers achieve the fastest time-to-value over traditional in-house approaches. CommVault consultants help clients design, build and operate optimal modern data management environments for their business needs. As a result, customers are accelerating, extending and optimizing the value of their Simpana Software ecosystem through a full suite of offerings ranging from Data Classification and Archive Policy Design to Architecture Design and Disaster Recovery Readiness.

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