Commvault Simpana 8 - update

7. January 2010 by Myke.

This is an follow up and update to the following post;  http://homerun-networks.com/2009/12/10/commvault-simpana-8-saving-lives-disk-space-and-relieving-stress/

We have been running Commvault Simpana 8 for 4 months and to be quite honest, it has been flawless and great.  As I mentioned before, we were concerned with future growth and what it would cost us for hardware for backups and more importantly, could we actually get backups the way we needed them?!?  Well, we nailed everything and then some.

We have had to restore multiple files including Exchange (single message and multiple messages), Exchange store (testing purposes), Server 2008 DC (testing purposes), VMWare virtual server (testing purposes), SQL database, Server 2008 system state (testing purposes) and multiple files on file shares.  Every single restore took less than 5 minutes except for the testing recoveries.  The testing recovery is part of an on-going plan to prepare for a major project, but it was still rock solid and flawless.

Domain rebuild recovery - We are in the planning process of re-building the entire domain and infrastructure of our company and I have begun the testing of Server 2008 recoveries and disaster recoveries.  So far I have tested recovering a 2008 domain controller after deleting multiple users and groups and replicating the change.  Easy as pie my friend, everything went into place and the replication took place and the domain was back up and running in minutes.  This domain rebuild has allowed me to test for just about every disaster possible and to document exactly every step in the case I get hit by a bus/train and the boss man has to take over for me.

All in all I could not be happier with our choice of moving our backups to Commvault.

*We received some e-mails in regards to Commvault and we have included those below*

What was your installation process like and how much time did it take you to convert from Symantec to Commvault?
-  The process itself was very easy and simple.  We disabled all the Symantec software and services and installed Commvault.  The install itself took about 2 hours, which included getting all the clients installed.  Once the suite was up and running we set the backup policies and that took another 2 hours.  All in all, it was smooth and very easy.

Did Commvault pay you for this article? (we got about 15+ of these emails)
-  No.  I firmly believe that sharing IT/IS knowledge with others in the industry is key to making all of our lives easier.  If I find something that rocks, I will tell everyone that wants to listen.  If I find something that sucks, I will tell everyone that wants to listen.  Any product that makes life as a systems engineer/systems admin/network engineer easier, why not share it with others?!  p.s. If Commvault is reading this article…I wear XXL shirts, love fast Italian cars, good beer, steak dinners and Amazon.com gift cards.

What do you think of the Commvault deduplication?
-  Do you remember Smeagol and his precious?  Well consider me being Smeagol and Commvault deduplication being my precious.  We must haves it, haves the precious we must.  We are currently getting a savings of 90.25% on physical storage space.  Or even easier to understand, we are getting an average of 13.4TB of backup data on 1.3TB of physical space.  Must haves the precious!

As always, if you have any questions please feel free to ask away.

posted by:Myke Reinhold

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