Commvault is looking to solve the challenges of exponential data growth by broadening its support for divergent storage snapshot platforms with the latest version of its Simpana software.

Simpana 9 also features a new take on deduplication and the the widespread challenge of managing rapid growth in virtual machines.

“Its all about modernisation of data protection and we spent a lot of time talking to our customers about the challenges they face,” said Gerry Sillars, Commvault Vice President Asia-Pacific and Japan.

“We have got customers who are moving 350TB of incremental data every night. Data continues to grow at 50-100 percent a year and the traditional ways just aren’t going to cut it any more in our opinion.”

Simpana 9 responds by merging storage array vendor’s snapshot technology (74 different arrays are now supported) with Commvault’s data management capabilities.

“Once we have the snapshot, its off the source, the production server, so the speed of recovery is greatly increased and there is no impact on production systems. It really frees up the virtual environment from the challenges of backup,” said Sillars

The Simpana platform also leverages CommVault’s SnapProtect snapshot technology to provide rapid protection and recovery of VMs, with automated discovery and more granular restore capabilities.

Sillars says the constant spawning of virtual server farms is goring to be a major issue.

“One of our customers FaHCSIA has gone from having no VMs 2 years ago to 300 VMs in test and 200 in production.”

New source-side deduplication promises to reduce the amount of data being transferred across corporate networks from remote servers by up to 90 percent, while slashing backup windows by more than 30 percent.