Data explosion disrupts local market in storage showdown

Companies struggling to contain explosive data growth rates claim continuing backup problems and poor archiving practices are disrupting business operations and contributing to serious storage issues.

These ongoing problems in the enterprise which is hogging valuable IT resources has been well-documented with the Enterprise Storage Group claiming more than one-third of all backups fail.

A survey of 150 large companies by TheInfoPro found one in four IT managers blame poor archiving as the key reason for unchecked data growth.

The same survey found archive capacity is expected to grow 52 per cent by year's end.

Backup, recovery and archiving products just don't do what they are supposed to leaving user's seriously frustrated, according to Gerry Sillars, managing director of Commvault Australia.

He believes the only way to deal with these challenges and to effectively address a full range of data management issues is by using a single, unified engine that provides backup, data protection, archiving, e-discovery, replication and e-mail.

Not surprisingly Sillars pointed to Commvault's own solution pointing out the single application boasts the same interface, same rules and same engine to attach modules as add-ons without integration issues.

"Many of the competing products on the market use different engines for each task and they do not integrate well whereas our product is a single application," Sillars explained.

"Our technology isn't the result of acquisition but development; for example, companies like Symantec which acquired Veritas and EMC which acquired Legato, have 20 different applications to solve the same issues."

Due to a lack of awareness in the market four or five years ago, Sillars said enterprises today are struggling with at least three different backuup products.

"These organizations purchased products a few years ago and now they are having scalability problems; the backup piece works but not the restore piece," he said.

"Tired of the stress customers are coming to us. We picked up 91 new customers in the last quarter and 70 per cent of all our wins in the Australian market were Veritas displacements."

Locally, Commvault has 1000 customers including the Australian Federal Police, WebCentral, the Commonwealth Bank's wealth management division and about 18 federal government agencies.

The company's biggest customer is Royal Dutch Shell which has 15,000 servers and Sillars is proud to point out that the company's CEO is an engineer.

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He said 50 per cent of staff work in engineering. Currently the company has 850 staff but this will increase to 920 by the end of the fiscal year.

Sillars said the Australian market is the "guiding light of the business" and has always been "exceptionally strong".

Rejecting Commvault's claims, a Symantec spokesperson said the company offers the most comprehensive, reliable, market-leading data protection for its customers whether they are SMB or enterprise.

The spokesperson pointed to Gartner research showing: "Symantec is the recognised leader in worldwide backup and recovery owning 44 percent of the market compared to only four percent by CommVault.

"The breadth of our solutions, combined with our expertise and understanding of the local market, enables Symantec to confidently provide our customers and partners with innovative and integrated technologies that manage and protect their information."

EMC was unavailable for comment.