CommVault and Software-as-a-Service

By Deni Connor
Principal Analyst, Storage Strategies NOW

Introduction

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) market is white hot as enterprise-size customers scramble to reduce their IT staffing costs and maintenance of applications, as well as meet exponential data growth and existing service-level agreements (SLAs). Small and mid-sized businesses without dedicated IT staffs and distributed enterprises with remote or branch offices are also turning to SaaS in an effort to simplify their infrastructures by offloading services such as backup and recovery, migration, replication and archiving to managed service or hosting providers.

The SaaS market is so hot that it has grabbed the attention of analysts, vendors and IT end-users. Revenue for SaaS or on-demand software is poised to reach over $11 billion dollars in 2011, according to one report. The market size surpassed $5.1 billion in 2007.

CommVault Systems, a provider of data management software, recently entered the SaaS market with two services — the Remote Operations Management Service (ROMS) and a CommVault Simpana-based managed service provider (MSP) offering. Both services are intended to ease the pain enterprise-, small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) suffer from trying to manage, monitor and control too much data in a cost-effective manner.

CommVault’s Remote Operations Management Service

ROMS is a Web-based integrated support automation system that provides customers with overnight, weekend and holiday monitoring of their CommVault-powered data protection, replication and migration environments, thus letting them reduce staffing and maintenance costs. It provides customers with visibility into their managed Simpana or QiNetix software suites and pairs it with integrated support from CommVault network operations center (NOC) technicians, who monitor the customer’s data protection operations 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

In a ROMS implementation, a ROMS listener is installed on the customer’s CommServe, which captures certain event conditions associated with job and job-phase failures defined in the CommServe database.  When an event occurs, it is placed into Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), which stages alerts and does not create contention if thousands of jobs fail at once. Each alert is sent from the customer site to CommVault’s NOC via Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) using the ROMS Web Service.   The Web Service, in turn, passes the alert to the ROMS database.

The ROMS database contains information about the customer for whom the alert has occurred, including the CommCell name, names of servers, server service-level agreements (SLAs) desired for each system, performance history and customer contacts.

Based on the server SLA the customer has established via the ROMS Customer Dashboard (pictured on the next page), the alert is acted on by instructions in the database. CommVault has established three server SLAs – the lowest SLA is gold, followed by platinum, and the highest is diamond. These SLAs can be moved from server to server as needs dictate or as conditions change.

The ROMS Customer Dashboard

If an alert is generated for a server that has a gold SLA, CommVault NOC personnel will e-mail actions, such as the error time, date, server name, error code and knowledgebase information necessary to resolve the issue to the customer contact(s).

In the platinum SLA, ROMS NOC personnel can ‘look inside’ the alert and determine if logs should be captured to further troubleshoot the issue.  This is accomplished automatically and does not require customer intervention, as it has full support integration.

In the diamond level SLA, systems that IT has deemed as business-critical and failing, will result in a telephone call to the customer to advise them of the nature of the failure, so that the customer can determine next steps. These steps include the ability to start remote support, wait and stand down until morning, or decide no action is necessary if the error was anticipated during maintenance operations.

ROMs is licensed per server and can be purchased directly from CommVault and authorized CommVault resellers.

The Simpana Managed Service Provider Solution

CommVault’s MSP offering lets distributed enterprises and SMBs put the control of their backup and archiving environments in a hosting provider’s hands. Implemented at this time by hosting providers such as DBSi, Incentra and Rackspace, the offering backs up the servers in an organization’s environment to the service provider’s location, affording the customer with reliable and highly available backup and recovery. Because the service is based on CommVault’s Simpana software suite, it also affords the MSP the ability to branch out into offering other Simpana-based services such as data migration, replication and e-discovery.

CommVault Simpana’s MSP component is hosted at the MSP’s network operations center. Agents are pushed or pulled from the NOC to the customer’s site non-disruptively. Through a browser-based application, customers can access the managed information.

CommVault’s Simpana-based MSP offering focuses on the delivery of data protection and archiving to SMBs, as well as enterprise-size businesses with remote or distributed branch offices. By deploying a SaaS solution like this, businesses can expect to reduce the cost of backup hardware and tape media and eliminate the cost of shipping media offsite. They can also expect to reduce staffing expenses associated with tape handling, troubleshooting and maintenance. Pricing is based on the number of servers protected.

SSG-NOW’s Assessment

Data protection, migration, replication and archiving services delivered on-demand like CommVault does is going to be a booming market. Recently, EMC and Symantec, as well as Web 2.0 players such as Amazon, validated this market by introducing online data protection services.

CommVault’s SaaS strategy is different from these services though, in that its MSP offering can accommodate more than just backup and recovery of data;  it also presents new opportunities for MSPs to complement backup services with archiving, e-discovery and replication services that are already part of CommVault’s Simpana software suite.

ROMs lets customers pay for interactive management as their networks grow and, it represents a continuous enhancement to the customer experience. It lets customers reduce IT infrastructure and personnel costs, and deal effectively with the costly error-prone data protection environment.

For enterprise-size and small and mid-sized customers, CommVault’s SaaS offerings are a real boon – customers can leverage their investments in data protection by using the ever-so-scalable Simpana software.

In addition, CommVault’s SaaS strategy also benefits the company itself, as it allows CommVault to stay true to its core competency – that of a software developer that sells through a strong channel of already established partners.