CommVault (News - Alert) has announced that Rackspace, a specialist in the IT hosting market delivering enterprise-level managed services to businesses, has reported increased efficiency and reliability of its IT operations and added to the number of data management services available to its customer base thorough its deployment of CommVault’s Simpana software.

 

Rackspace delivers a diverse suite of enterprise-class hosted IT services to businesses of all sizes. Rackspace’s portfolio of companies also includes the Mosso cloud computing platform and Mailtrust , a provider of business-class hosted email solutions.

 

CommVault develops Singular Information Management solutions for high-performance data protection, universal availability, and simplified management of data on complex storage networks. Its Simpana software suite of products was designed to work together seamlessly from the ground up, sharing a single code and common function set, to deliver superlative data protection, archive, replication, search, and resource management capabilities.

 

In addition to protecting its customers’ IT infrastructure, Rackspace also relies on the data management capabilities of CommVault software to help protect its own IT systems. Rackspace began deploying CommVault in January 2007.

 

Shannon Ward, Senior Product Engineer, Rackspace, said that when making the decision to switch to CommVault, the company estimated it would see a 50 percent time savings in configuring complex customer applications for backup with CommVault as compared to other backup software it was using previously. Ward noted that because of CommVault’s singular approach to data management, Rackspace has been able to significantly reduce the level of complexity in its data centers, while also increasing the accessibility of mission critical applications, such as its customer’s Oracle (News - Alert) databases. Overall, CommVault software has reduced the number of hours required to manage our environment, improved reliability and service levels to the company’s customers and reduced the cost of protecting its customers’ IT infrastructures.

 

By switching to CommVault software, Rackspace was able to replace five point products with Simpana software to build a single data protection platform and, thereby, streamline administration and reporting to better serve its customers. According to Rackspace, some tasks, such as software updates, are now completed in approximately half of the time taken previously. With one interface that unifies the administration and reporting for CommVault’s entire software suite, Rackspace has reduced its overall administrative effort, helping free up IT personnel to focus on more strategic tasks and help customers. On the back end, one central database delivers consolidated reporting information for sharing with customers to quickly and easily demonstrate what they are backing up.

 

David West, CommVault’s vice president of worldwide marketing and business development, commented that maintaining a data center environment that ensures continuous availability of data while simultaneously offering the highest level of data protection is not an easy task, and in today’s cost conscience business world, administrators continuously struggle to strike a balance between controlling IT expenditures and meeting service level agreements. He noted that using CommVault, Rackspace can help ensure that customers experience reliable access to data, and also align IT with the evolving business needs of the enterprise.

 

Using CommVault software, Rackspace will also be able to offer other information management services beyond traditional data backup. For example, customers needing to deal with regulations in the payment card industry often require extra security of encrypting backup data before moving it offsite. Rackspace is now able to customize and deliver solutions to these customers based on the encryption features within the Simpana suite, without adding layers of management complexity.