CommVault News & Media

The topic of eDiscovery is certainly a hot button issue for legal and IT teams alike, from both a cost and risk perspective. The 2006 Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) amendments triggered the market hype because they broadened the scope of discoverable material to include all Electronically Stored Information (ESI). Since then, the digital landscape has changed so dramatically that the conversation has continued, with elevated intensity.

Gartner just published its 2013 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery Software, and, for the third year in a row, CommVault was named to the Leaders Quadrant. You can see where the top 4 vendors are placed and where CommVault landed.

There's no "half-time" in hockey, nor half a goal scored in hockey, but a "half" is significant for CommVault as CommVault reached the half million dollar mark this season in our efforts to help children's charities and organizations throughout the USA through our Hockey Helping Kids (HHK) program. Our HHK program has come a long way since its humble beginnings back in Madison Square Garden in 2001 to our most recent event at the Xcel Energy Center in Minneapolis on April 23^rd. We've had many sponsors throughout the years assisting us, but first and foremost, we have to acknowledge Microsoft, with several divisions participating this season — Windows Server (with a special shout-out to the GM of Windows Server, Gavriella Schuster), Windows Azure and Microsoft overall. It's easy to understand why they share our passion to give back to the community.

If you didn't make it to CommVault's recent Hockey Helping Kids (HHK) event at the Wells Fargo Center in Philly, you missed a fantastic opportunity to meet and mingle with some terrific CommVault employees, customers and partners. I was there and I can tell you it was the very best combination of networking, fun and philanthropy.

It's time to rethink your data deduplication strategy. Most environments using dedupe today either suffer from resource bottlenecks, scale limitations, or a combination of both. This seems to be particularly true with the rapid spread of dedupe appliances. Don't get me wrong — a dedupe appliance is a useful tool that solves some important challenges customers may face when rapidly rolling out the technology to see a quick benefit. But this strategy retains the fundamental reliance on hardware that can create other problems. In particular, as datasets continue to accelerate in growth, these approaches fundamentally ask you to throw more and more hardware at the problem. As a result, if you're deduping this way today, you may be overpaying and/or underperforming. Read on to determine how to remedy these problems.

The landscape around how Education Services and products are accessed and used is under a radical evolution. Functional expertise is now as much a by-product of "Googling" as it is professional experience and knowledge. A 20-year study, conducted from 1986 to 2006, assessed the percentage of knowledge required by workers to complete their work; researchers determined that there was a 7x DECREASE in the value of retained knowledge for employees over that time period. The change engine in this dynamic – the Internet. Fast forward seven years into the era of BYOD and it's clear that creating highly accessible "byte-sized" access to information assets is critical for employee success.

If you have any doubts that protecting data at the edge and providing employees with self-service access to their information, on any device, makes them more productive, then this true story is for you. I know it's true because I was there. Thankfully, CommVault has fully embraced the growing trend of empowering the mobile workforce and, as the industry slogan says, we "eat our own dog food" by deploying CommVault Edge^™ to protect the data on our employees' laptops and desktops.

As one of the newest members of the CommVault family, I was privileged to attend my first CommVault Hockey Helping Kids (HHK) event recently at the Boston Garden. Unlike our usual events, this one took place over a two-day period, in the Boston Bruins NHL venue, but instead of a Bruins game, attendees were treated to dinner and the NCAA Division I Hockey Semi-Finals on Friday evening, March 22^nd. This was not a typical one-day HHK event that takes place on NHL ice in conjunction with a game, usually between rival teams. No, this was a different kind of night, but a special one for me.

Hardly a day goes by where I don't see an article or email with the letters "BYOD" or the word "mobility" in it. What I've found talking to customers is that there is some merit to the volume of articles on these typically intertwined topics. Many tell me they are thinking about these issues, some are getting their feet wet, and a few are already all in, so I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents from the data management perspective.

The recent run of cold, snowy weather in my home state of Massachusetts reminded me that disasters come in many shapes and sizes and they can strike at any time of the year. While blizzards do not typically fall into the natural disaster category, they do have the potential to dramatically affect your business's access to critical data. Here in North America, it is more likely that hurricane, flood, tornado, fire or even an earthquake will test your disaster recovery plan.