Growing data management and protection needs

Protecting an increasing volume of data is key to Mitchell International’s digital transformation and next growth phase. “We’re an expanding business,” explains Tim Carben, principal information systems engineer at Mitchell International. “By keeping up with the latest technologies and trends, Commvault enables us to protect our services and data with greater efficiency.”

Headquartered in California with locations around the world, Mitchell provides smart technology solutions to the property and casualty industry. Mitchell is a technology provider of collision repair, auto physical damage, auto casualty, workers comp, pharmacy solutions, OEMs and dealers, disability and group health across the America, Europe and Asia. The company facilitates several million electronic transmissions between more than 16,000 business partners each month.

Mitchell wants to evolve its existing model to a more services-driven approach, which has already increased data volumes and management requirements. To support this shift, the company needed a scalable, reliable, and easy-to-manage data protection solution.

Protecting a diverse environment with scalable capacity

A Commvault customer since 2005, Mitchell already used Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery along with Commvault IntelliSnap software for NetApp snapshots. To meet the needs of its growing business and optimize the storage of backup data, Mitchell decided to put Commvault HyperScale Appliance through its paces in early 2018. The company needed a solution to simplify management and rollout, and speed up its primary media agent layer. The Commvault appliance has provided a significant year-on-year cost saving compared to other solutions.

“Our proof of concept confirmed Commvault HyperScale could provide the right level of scalability and reliability,” says Carben. As a result, Mitchell has migrated the backup and recovery operations for its development and quality assurance environments to Commvault HyperScale, and plans to add its production and disaster recovery sites.

Commvault HyperScale Appliance and Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery protect 636.4 terabytes of data across a wide range of technology platforms, including Linux, AIX, and Microsoft Windows, as well as cloud-based services, such as Microsoft Office 365. The solution protects Oracle databases, email archives, virtual machines, physical machines, and NAS.

“We can protect all our IT assets, old and new, on-premises and in the cloud from a single platform,” says Carben. “Commvault’s commitment to investing in the organic development of next-generation capabilities means it is always able to meet our backup needs.”

Assets are backed up directly to Commvault HyperScale, improving efficiency and network utilization. “The backup times are fast, and we no longer have to worry about overloading the network with our backups,” reveals Carben. “We recover directly from Commvault HyperScale too, which has increased the speed of granular Linux file recovery.”

The Commvault solution supports multiple storage policies for backups and auxiliary backup copies, which include network file storage, network attached storage and a private cloud hosted NetApp StorageGRID.

With Commvault, we are ready for whatever the future brings. It delivers efficiency, reliability and scalability.

— Tim Carben, Principal Information Systems Engineer
Mitchell Internationa

Boosting efficiency and agility

With Commvault, Mitchell has reduced the administrative overhead associated with managing backup and recovery by eliminating manual tasks and optimizing resource utilization. “Commvault Command Center provides a single pane of glass and simplifies ongoing management and reporting,” says Carben. “We can now show how much storage is being consumed by each business unit and demonstrate compliance with certain policies.”

With the proposed California Consumer Privacy Act looming, Commvault’s reporting capability will prove invaluable to Mitchell, allowing the company to quickly and efficiently demonstrate that it is protecting customer data in compliance with the new legislation.

As well as supporting backup and recovery, Commvault HyperScale makes it faster to move workloads around. “We were impressed when we used the Commvault appliance to recover full VMs and granular linux data,” explains Carben. “In some cases it takes a matter of minutes to backup the data and then another 15 to recover it.”

Mitchell is constantly looking for opportunities to unlock new efficiency gains, and is investigating how it can use Commvault technologies to optimize snapshot management and enable eDiscovery in the future.

“With Commvault, we’re confident our future data protection needs can be met,” says Carben. “Its solutions deliver reliability, efficiency, and scalability, so we can continue to grow in the knowledge that we have appropriate protection for our business and IT assets.”