Redstor Implement First CommVault Solution at Major Oil and Gas Company in Aberdeen

Redstor helped an international oil and gas services company headquartered in Aberdeen UK with a CommVault implementation. The company is one of the world’s leading drilling and engineering contractors with some 8000 personnel and a presence in over 20 countries.

Redstor were engaged to provide recommendations for a new backup solution based on the company’s specific requirements. This process consisted of several stages: an initial analysis of their current set-up; an on-going dialogue with their IT administrators; a consideration of suitable products available in the market place and finally a recommendation.

The ageing backup infrastructure was based on EMC Networker software and an ADIC Scalar 100 tape library that is now unable to meet the demands of a changed and expanded server and storage environment. Hardware and software elements are five years old and causing difficulties through mechanical failure and a lack of functionality. This has led to backup windows stretching to unmanageable lengths, job failures and ultimately unprotected data.

A technology refresh was required to address these issues. Software product replacement offered additional functionality that would improve backup efficiency. Introducing backup-to-disk provided support for server virtualisation and a faster, more reliable, restore capability. A new tape library and drives would provide higher throughput and capacity for a smaller footprint.

Why CommVault?


The CommVault product offers protection for all the major requirements: Lotus Notes, Windows File Systems, VMware and Active Directory.

The CommVault product offers integrated de-duplication to eliminate redundant data before it is transmitted to backup targets. As the de-duplication is embedded it is more aware of data content and therefore more efficient in processing data blocks. The oil and gas company is also at liberty to use its own choice of disk sub-system as a de-duplication target rather than an additional turn-key appliance as a hardware solution would necessitate.

The CommVault iDataAgent includes support for auxiliary copies of backups from disk-to-disk or disk-to-tape. It is therefore possible to replicate de-duplicated data backups between heterogeneous disk systems without additional cost.

The CommVault Universal Virtual Server Agent provides additional functionality for VMware environments beyond its competitors. For example, volume and incremental image level backup. The latter in particular allows for space efficient image backups from which file, volume or full image level restores are all possible. A VM discovery feature enables newly created VMs to be identified and captured in a backup automatically through a default policy. Virtual to Physical restores are also possible from an image backup thanks to embedded support for VMConverter.

The CommVault GridStor feature allows for load balancing and failover between MediaAgents ensuring that backups will continue even in the event of a MediaAgent fault.

Additional software options like the Data Classification Enabler can enhance and improve scan capabilities on Windows File systems, eliminating much of the overhead of processing large numbers of folders and files and reducing backup times.

CommVault Simpana is a Windows-centric product. It was developed in close co-operation with Microsoft and consequently the CommServe component is Windows only. Most alternatives, including Networker, originated in the mainframe and UNIX space and were “adapted” for Windows.

CommVault Simpana is much more than a backup and recovery product. The same core, or Common Technology Engine, drives additional features such as Archiving, Data Replication and Storage Resource Management. These can all be added at a later stage to create a powerful storage management suite. For example, Archiving could be added for the file servers eliminating “stale” data from these servers that would also be de-duplicated onto disk. In turn this would reduce backup requirements on the servers themselves.

CommVault Simpana has been identified by the Gartner Group as one of only two vendors in a positive position in the Enterprise Backup/Recovery software market in their 2008 MarketScope evaluation. Where it was commended for its “strong support for VMware backup” and “aggressive road map of planned capabilities”.