Wanganui District Council, a 43,000 resident district on the North Island of New Zealand, is using CommVault Simpana 9 software to protect vital public records, provide employees with uninterrupted access to critical operational data and ensure compliance with New Zealand's Public Records Act.

An IT team of 14 (including support staff) serves approximately 400 users across a heavily virtualised VMware environment with critical applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint; an Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS) for data retention; Geographic Information System (GIS) for emergency services and civil defence; and property and rating software for managing property, land and address information.

The council reports Simpana software's modern data management capabilities has  reduced the time required to backup and recover 6 TB of data--what used to take days to restore now can be recovered in seconds.

The council also relies on Simpana software's embedded deduplication to eliminate redundant data, which further decreases its backup window.

Simpana Archive replaced a legacy platform as Simpana better supported the wide-ranging data retention requirements placed on the council by national legislation and Simpana Enterprise Search better expedited both internal and external requests for public and operational data.

Tthe council will be adding functionality, including Simpana SnapProtect to further expedite virtual machine restores and Edge Data Protection to safeguard data residing on remote desktops and laptops.

With CommVault's integrated archiving and search capabilities, Wanganui District Council can also extend the reach of its digitisation project and EDRMS by enabling them to safeguard, search and retrieve files across all its data stores, encompassing SharePoint, Microsoft Outlook, PowerPoint and other important information.

By incorporating CommVault in its overarching disaster recovery strategy Wanganui District Council can better support independent retention policies. Wanganui can efficiently make copies of backup data and move it to the offsite data centre by coupling Simpana software deduplication with DASH (Deduplication Accelerated Streaming Hash) replication.

Jason Simons, Information Services Manager for Wanganui District Council, said, "With many products we might only use 20 or 30 percent of the total functionality but we plan to use 100 percent of Simpana software because CommVault makes it easy with its seamless integration and centralised management console. We don't have to learn another product and users don't have to learn another product--which we really appreciate about Simpana software."

"Our ability to restore a VM machine within seconds is huge. When compared to the time and effort it took previously, Simpana software paid for itself immediately. Additionally, our confidence level is extremely high, knowing that all data can be recovered in relatively short order, which is a big deal as the safety of our information is paramount."