CommVault's Simon Gregory delivers a session Thursday afternoon at WebhostingDay 2010.
The WHIR is reporting live from Germany at WebhostingDay 2010. Stay tuned to our news, features, blogs and WHIR tv for more updates from the event.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Another of the afternoon presentations delivered Thursday afternoon at WebhostingDay was “simplicity is the key to succes,” delivered by Simon Gregory, international business development director from data management company CommVault.
He says the business of backup (or data retention/protection/management) has been considered a tax on business, not a lot of people find backup a particularly interesting aspect of running a service provider, but that may be changing.
One thing that is becoming interesting, says Gregory, is that the company is no longer selling to one client (now that it is working with service providers). Now it is selling to companies that have thousands or tens of thousands of clients.
The primary challenge of a customer like that is the need to scale with them, since they’re most likely going to grow (they’re definitely planning to). And backup solutions aren’t traditionally designed to scale like that.
Service provider customers also have mixed environments, which requires the backup solution to have a broad coverage.
The service provider market is also interesting because of the range of solutions that service providers deliver via backup, for example, disaster recovery.
The other big challenge posed by service providers is the model by which they buy. Most service providers don’t want to buy a big license all at once. They want to sort of pay as they go. And they’re deeply concerned with support. Support needs to be able to scale to support potentially thousands of nodes.
It also needs to operate at the lowest possible cost, in order to let service providers maintain the relatively slim margins they are often operating at.
CommVault has also come to focus on monitoring service, so service providers are able to monitor and manage their SLAs, and to report to customers on how they are (hopefully) exceeding those SLAs.
CommVault, says Gregory, scales based on the amount of business you’re doing, not based on the type of service you’re offering. For instance, if you want to expand from simple data storage to include the product’s other services, you don’t have to build additional infrastructure. It all runs on the same storage infrastructure, and is all part of the same platform, with a single centralized management console.
The company’s products are entirely virtualized, he says. There is no such thing as a separate silo of storage infrastructure within its architecture.
A lot of this presentation was a very briskly-delivered run-down of how CommVault designed its backup technology to support the service provider environment, an extremely long list that included support for operating systems and languages, automated updating and many others. I didn’t get them all down.
Financially speaking, the product uses an active licensing model, where the service provider pays for what is used. The cost is calculated per server per month, and discounts are provided based on volume and growth.
The specific services that can be offered included backup as a service, email and file system archiving as a service, disaster recovery as a service and e-discovery as a service.
At a basic level, there is nothing really theoretical being discussed here, aside from the principles according to which CommVault built its solution (for the service provider market, as I have mentioned). The basic point being made is, “this is a very efficient, well conceived and fully realized way to build out data management and backup services for service providers.”
The company released a “cloud connector” a few months ago to make the solutions compatible with cloud hosting environments – a fact that works well with most of the themes being presented in the course of this event.
If you want to know everything about what CommVault offers, I might point you in the direction of their website (www.commvault.com). If you end up talking to Gregory, be careful. In my experience, he talks quickly.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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