St. Francis Xavier protects and optimises virtual and Cloud environments

St. Francis Xavier (SFX) Sixth Form College has deployed CommVault’s Simpana® software for VM Backup, Recovery and Cloud Management Solution Set, enabling the organisation to make efficient use of disk & tape storage whilst protecting and optimising its virtualised and cloud infrastructures.

“The Simpana for VM Backup, Recovery and Cloud Solution Set not only met our expectations but has exceeded it,” said Thufael Islam, Director of Networks & IS at St. Francis Xavier Sixth Form College. “Since the installation of CommVault’s Solution Set, I have the peace of mind of knowing the infrastructure and its data is constantly backed up and protected. This has saved the IT department a huge amount of time to focus on other tasks rather than troubleshooting backup errors. As a bonus it has provided us with free space for the growing data generated by more than 1700+ people relying on the IT system. Colleges not only have to protect their data but be able to quickly restore it in the event of data loss or corruption, which is exactly what this solution does.”

Faced with managing growing amounts of data at a time when education budgets are being stretched to the limits, St. Francis Xavier College, a top of the league college for Inner and South London (DFE January 2014) that offers 50 courses to its 1500 students, benefited from CommVault’s simplified pricing and packaging options. With constant pressure on the IT infrastructure, the college required a solution that was cost-effective and reliable. CommVault’s Simpana Solution Sets provide enterprise backup functionality for SFX at a lower price than renewing its previous solution.

St. Francis Xavier previously used Backup Exec from Symantec, but the system was unnecessarily complex to maintain, expensive to run and time consuming to operate. Backing up data typically took the whole weekend and the IT department experienced downtime and failures that it struggled to resolve.

Even with its wide variety of features, CommVault’s Simpana Solution Set costs less than the renewal of Backup Exec. The VM Backup, Recovery and Cloud Management solution protects the college’s 45 virtual machines (VMs) and is much easier to use than the previous system. Offering compression and a de-duplication ratio of 1:5 at SFX, the college has found that it can store six weeks of data on its local storage compared to the two weeks it was previously limited to, saving local disk storage space and providing a reliable and inexpensive solution for the IT team to work with.

CommVault’s Solution Sets can be individually deployed or combined as part of a comprehensive data protection and information management solution. Simpana for VM Backup, Recovery and Cloud Management enables VM administrators and end users to build, protect and optimise virtualised and cloud infrastructures.

“With its flexibility, the Simpana Solution Set was created exactly for organisations like St. Francis Xavier,” said Philip van der Wilt, Vice President Sales EMEA at CommVault. “Simpana software has enabled SFX to manage its own VM provisioning, management, backup, recovery, retirement and archiving operations through a single interface across platforms. All of this means the solution requires less time, labour and budget to operate, which makes it a win-win for SFX.”

CommVault partner CD-DataHouse deployed the solution and trained the IT team at St. Francis Xavier College. Carl Dipane, Technical Director, at CD-DataHouse Ltd comments, “CommVault’s latest Solution Sets are ideal for organisations looking for affordable yet reliable enterprise solutions which can scale up, when required, to a single platform approach. The Solution Sets open up a larger customer base than before, providing SMBs with vital IT solutions at a much more affordable rate. It has also provided us with a flexible platform for the channel, which is a huge benefit for our team and for CommVault.”