January 27, 2009: CommVault has unveiled the latest edition of its enterprise data management software, Simpana 8, with advances in recovery management, data reduction, virtual server protection, and content organisation.

Simpana 8 provides an enterprise content classification engine that automatically classifies and categorises content based on defined rules and search patterns. These link to workflow policies that profile, organise and repurpose content to meet specific information management tasks, including legal hold for eDiscovery.

Information assets are automatically organised into classification groups to provide users with better control over new and existing information. Rather than adopting a costly retention strategy across all data, required data is instead managed, retained and organised to meet specific business requirements, leading to improvements in access, operations and cost savings.

Simpana 8 software's new integrated workflow is designed to target information management processes with leading ECM systems and facilitates intuitive access to unstructured content. Pattern matched information is tagged according to how businesses want to view and organize their information and then placed within desired business taxonomies and records management tools. This allows business users to manage and access governance information themselves, reducing the business risk associated with compliance and potentially saving hundreds of hours while avoiding costly delays by unnecessarily involving administrators in a discovery.

Simpana 8 offers new snapshot-based data management, data deduplication, laptop and desktop protection, remote office data management and advanced copy management features.

The company's largest software release to date, Simpana 8 culminates 18 months of development and includes more than 300 enhancements and 140 newly added product features. CommVault has filed over 50 US patent applications related to Simpana software and its 8.0 release.

"Simpana 8 is radically changing the economics of data management for businesses everywhere," said N. Robert Hammer, CommVault's chairman, president and CEO. "Today's economic environment is challenging enterprises to do more with less. Simpana 8 simplifies the way businesses store and manage rapidly growing amounts of data and can help customers ensure compliance, gain operational efficiencies, and dramatically reduce their data management and related storage expenses by up to 40 percent."

Data deduplication spans both disk and tape tiers of storage. In the face of rising power and cooling requirements and escalating growth rates, deduplication with tape promises to reduce the footprint of long-term vaulting or compliance copies by up to 90 percent. ]

New advanced protection and recovery features are claimed to increase reliability by approximately 20 Percent and recovery speeds by up to 77 percent.

Simpana 8 provides multiple options for protecting business critical data at distributed remote and branch office locations. These solutions facilitate WAN efficient transfers to pass compressed and encrypted data between sites, as well as rapid recovery that helps to minimize the risk and cost of downtime.

Centralised, automated policies applied to data residing on workstations and laptops help facilitate compliance and search for rapid eDiscovery of both backup and archive data. End users can also perform their own recoveries, eliminating the need for local administrators and providing further cost savings.

New SnapBackup feature integrates seamlessly with hardware-based snapshot technologies to create persistent application and data consistent recovery copies directly from snapshots, bypassing the production server and virtually eliminating the need for an operational backup window.

Simpana software removes the configuration and management complexity normally associated with snapshot management, creates a unified policy management framework for multiple pre-certified storage vendors including EMC and NetApp, and offers point and click recovery points from any storage tier (online, nearline, offline).

Simpana 8 includes a host of flexibility and usability options designed to simplify management of virtualised environments. Auto-discovery helps eliminate time consuming manual processes, while ensuring users meet their protection/recovery service level agreements. Users can conduct backups in an efficient off-host mode to minimize the impact on production and move just the changes to ensure seamless scalability. Additionally, users benefits from a broad range of recovery options from single files to virtual disks to the entire machine; and cross platform restores from virtual systems to physical servers, or across virtual platforms such as converting images between the VMware platform and a Microsoft Hyper-V system.

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