CommVault Expands Simpana 8 With New Cloud Storage Capabilities
The moves follow CommVault's introduction in February of new cloud-friendly protocols, including the representational state transfer (REST) protocol, to Simpana 8, said Jeff Echols, senior director of cloud solutions for the Oceanport, N.J.-based storage vendor.
CommVault's Simpana 8 is now being used by Dell as part of a new appliance to do high-speed data deduplication and provide connectivity to storage clouds, Echols said.
Dell is OEMing the Simpana 8 software for as part of its PowerVault DL2200 appliance. With Simpana 8, the PowerVault DL2200 now integrates with storage clouds from EMC, Amazon, Rackspace, Windows Azure, Nirvanix, Iron Mountain, and Mezeo Software, he said.
The PowerVault DL2200 deduplicates data at speeds of up to 3.0 TBs per hour. It provides for up to 24 TBs of internal storage in a 2U appliance, and can scale to over 300 TBs in total capacity.
CommVault's Simpana 8 also now includes the ability to do data backups to virtual servers in San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace's Cloud Files online storage service, Echols said.
"Customers were telling us it would be great to back up or store data to a cloud," he said. "But wouldn't it be better if they could add data to a virtual machine at a remote site so they could recover data without the need for a new server."
Simpana 8 with the Rackspace Cloud Files offering provides customers the ability to mount a backup to a virtual machine in the Rackspace cloud in the event of a disaster at the customer's local site and be up and running even before the users knew there was a problem, Echols said.
This offering is aimed at midmarket and small businesses where customers still dump everything to tape and as a result require several days to mount their backups to new servers, he said.
The ability to mount a data backup to a virtual machine in the cloud with Simpana 8 is currently certified only with the Rackspace cloud, but it can be used with any cloud storage offering, Echols said.
For service providers who build their cloud services using the Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform from Houston-based Mezeo Software, Simpana 8 can now integrate directly with their service for cloud-based backups.
Mezeo develops software that allows service providers to use any industry-standard hardware to build appliances to provide cloud-based storage services, Echols said.
"Now existing Mezeo partners and service providers can use CommVault to drive more of their services," he said.