CommVault Systems and NEC Claim "Gold" in Backup and Disaster Recovery

When a specific product receives recognition or an award from an independent third party, it is always a cause for celebration. Both NEC's HYDRAstor and CommVault's Galaxy received Storage magazine and searchstorage.com's Gold award in their respective 2007 Product of the Year "Backup and Disaster Recovery Hardware" and "Backup and Disaster Recovery Software" categories. However it was much more than a "win" for either of these a products; rather it was a validation of years of research and hard work to deliver products that met the tactical needs of today's businesses and are also designed to meet their more strategic needs of backup and disaster recovery going forward.

CommVault Systems and NEC take different but complimentary tactics to solving today's unique and increasingly complex enterprise data management and protection needs. CommVault Systems Simpana software suite has brought together a portfolio of features including backup software, continuous data replication, file level deduplication and enterprise search under one common data management software interface.

The strength of CommVault's Simpana software suite is that all of the agents for these different products are designed to work with and leverage the same underlying technology called their Common Technology Engine (CTE). This feature enables companies to share and search the same repository of data regardless of which of their respective agents collects it.

NEC's HYDRAstor conversely addresses a more veiled but equally vexing problem within organizations - the inability to economically and easily scale deduplicating storage systems. Deduplication is becoming a popular feature on storage systems that are dedicated to backup but what some companies are coming to realize - in some cases too late - is that even storage systems that perform deduplication during the backup process have performance and capacity limits. This forces companies to introduce more deduplicating backup appliances or replace smaller deduplicating backup appliances with larger ones.

This is where HYDRAstor stands out from the crowd. Companies can start small with a configuration that meets their requirements which can then independently scale-out the original configuration's performance or capacity as needed. This frees companies from the task of micromanaging the growth and replacement backup appliances so they can remain focused on managing their larger backup and business processes.

But aside from these technical marvels that CommVault Systems and NEC respectively delivered in their software and hardware, what they did was not confuse users with their feature set but deliver products that satisfy deeper corporate desires for less complexity coupled with easier administration. In order to deliver on these requirements, both companies literally had to go back to the drawing boards to re-examine the type of software and hardware that companies really neededin today's enterprise environments.

CommVault's Simpana software suite and NEC's HYDRAstor are the results of that analysis and re-architecture. While last week's "Gold" award from Storage magazine and searchstorage.com was important and a nice feather in the caps for both of these companies, these two companies are more importantly coming to market with products that closely align with the needs of more enterprises today. If that isn't worth its weight in gold, I don't know what is.