Indian organisations struggling with multiple backup solns

Companies are looking to consolidate multiple backup solutions bought in the last few years of unprecedented growth, says Don Foster, Product Management, Commvault and Ramesh Mamgain in conversation with Abhishek Raval.

According to the recent Gartner finding, the demand for data back-up and data recovery solutions will see a surge. What are the reasons?
Ramesh Mamgain:
Enterprises, in the last few years were in a hyper growth mode. They never really bothered about the type of DR, backup arrangements. The solutions were implemented but more in the form of a tick mark in the box and less as a conscious effort towards a planned rollout.

Now, with the compliance requirements mounting, in businesses like FSIs and telcos, back-up solution is up on the pecking order. According to the compliance, in the FSI vertical, organisations should keep records of the last seven years; the telcos should have CDRs of atleast six months on the primary storage and for about three years on secondary storage.

What are the trends in challenges that drives CIOs to buy systems from Commvault?
Don Foster:
Globally, the adoption of cloud solutions by enterprises has brought a certain level of complexity in managing workloads on the cloud. Commvault has partnered with organisations to simplify their cloud infrastructure to serve their customers better.

“We have got the solutions down the path, we know what we are doing,” is what the high level executives in large organisations, seem to think. However as we interacted with those who are incharge of making the cloud solutions a reality for the organisation, they are still in two minds on how to adopt the cloud model.

So, in many cases they are coming to us asking how can we help them manouvre some of the workloads on the cloud, what can the cloud mean to them and how can Commvault help them.

Ultimately it all comes down to how can IT help in speeding up business functions, make things more efficient for the end users, for the customers that they are going to be servicing or it’s for their internal processes. All this being done, with the IT as a function also reducing their overall costs. These have always been the core drivers for why the customers come to Commvault.

We help them by classifying the workloads inside their DCs to give an insight into, which workloads might be available for manouvering into the cloud and what can be run on the traditional IT environment.

There is also scope for companies to work in the area of basic data protection. The large databases, the hypervisors etc can be protected more effectively vis-a-vis as how it’s done currently.

Managing workloads with the right security posture in mind is what the companies are looking for and Commvault is trying to solve this, keeping three areas in mind: ways to reduce costs; simplifying operations and reduce risks in the organisation.

Ramesh Mamgain:
From an Indian perspective, in the last few years, IT infrastructure in the country, across organisations grew at a very fast pace. Businesses underestimated the growth projections. The new customer enrolments were growing by leaps and bounds and thus the resultant growth of the IT infrastructure was not planned to the fullest. It was more of a patchwork among the disparate systems. The infrastrcuture thus bought in haste was not integrated efficiently due to time constraint and conservative estimate. Thus companies want to optimise and streamline their IT architectures.

From a back-up perspective too, you will find most of the organisations having backup solutions from multiple vendors. As a result, now with a bit of downturn and the IT budgets getting cut, CIOs are feeling the heat and they want to optimise their back-up architectures.

Secondly, most of the architectures in the larger organisations like FSIs and telcos have outlived their utility. They are either out of life or out of service life. These companies are looking at consolidating or doing a rip & replace.

We find this to be a challenge faced by most of the potential customers. We are looking at consolidating everything or getting newer technology to help them to be more efficient in terms of power, cooling, cost etc.

Commvault provides an all in one kind of a solution. Our competition offers different solutions for different requirements – a separate solution for back-up, Desktop Laptop Option (DLO) etc. In our case, it’s an integrated all-in-one solution. Customers are looking at a solution like ours. As and when they look at upgrading or renewing their infrastructure, they look for a simple and common architecture.

With one of our customers, there were twelve backup servers. They have reduced it to two. It results in cost-cutting or the infrastructure getting freed up to process more efficient tasks.

Any case studies to validate your point?
Ramesh Mamgain: A leading retail giant in India bought the solution from Commvault. They were looking for a DLO backup solution and were in the process of exploring point product companies.

They are using an Oracle DB. A point product cannot do an Oracle backup. They were storing all the data in main storage. We suggested to archive old data. So, only the precious or hot data is backed up. The customer then realised the value of what we were trying to offer.

The second client is a leading automobile manufacturer in India. They were looking for a solution to back up SAP HANA. It’s well known, there are not many references for SAP HANA back up from vendors in our space, not only in India but globally. We did a PoC, and rolled out the backup solution. In fact the company is even expanding the solution to one of the other areas of their business.

What’s your USP?
Don Foster: We have a tool that does a highly consistent snapshot on the storage array. This is Commvault’s USP.

It can be a script or a tool, an API – you can take a snapshot of that. The question is how consistent is that data? And if our customer has to bet the business on that one snapshot, will it be able to return the information of high integrity every time? And that’s where the question always lies. How do i link what is basically a storage view to that of the application view to grab a copy of information at any point in time and know that it’s of high quality.

So, the point of differentiation when compared to EMC, Symantec, HP and others is in the data down view of how we drive a snapshot. It’s irrespective, if the databases have been virtualised or they are on traditional, physical servers. We ensure that the information all the way down to the actual data layer is consistent before the snapshot is driven. So, the OS, the hypervisor, the actual DB APIs are orchestrated accordingly, to ensure that they are in a consistent state before we make a call for a snapshot to the actual storage array layer to provide an actual point in time copy of all the volumes that are underneath that data structure.