Features - Storage Innovations:

COMMVAULT DETAILS VIRTUALIZATION PROMISES AND CHALLENGES

Addressing what is rapidly becoming known in the storage management industry as "the V-word," CommVault Systems Inc, a provider of unified enterprise data management solutions, released a white paper and glossary of storage management terms detailing both the benefits and limitations of storage virtualization technology.

"Virtualization itself is not exactly a new concept," commented Larry Cormier, CommVault vice president of marketing and business development and author of the white paper. "The basic technique dates back to the seventies in both disk and tape storage. Transferring this technique to the open systems world, however, is posing a number of challenges for enterprise IT management. While most industry discussion of virtualization currently centers on the SAN, at CommVault we believe a broader enterprise view is necessary in order for virtualization to come into its own and help IT management achieve simplified and streamlined storage management."

The CommVault virtualization white paper, "Seeing the Forest, Not the Trees," is available for downloading at www.commvault.com, and discusses various virtualization techniques for hosts, storage subsystems, in-band systems, out-of-band redirectors and storage domain managers.

"Storage administrators are cracking under the load of managing myriad storage devices and servers across multiple enterprise sites," continued Cormier. "A logical and unified view of such networks is possible, but IT management should be aware of the choices and options available to them as they pursue this goal. We've attempted to provide a helpful overview of some of these options in our current white paper."

About CommVault Galaxy

CommVault's Galaxy data management solution offers a unified, scalable data protection solution for distributed, heterogeneous environments, including UNIX, Linux, Windows, Netware, Oracle, SQL Server, Informix, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint Portal Server, Lotus Notes, NAS devices and SAN architectures. With Galaxy, policy-based data protection can be enforced across operating environments and applications, helping users simplify complex storage networks. Galaxy's storage virtualization capabilities simplify installation, training, administration and access, as well as provide a single, streamlined view of global data resources. Galaxy Storage Policies let IT administrators logically manage SAN, NAS & LAN data in complex enterprise networks, and provide fast, high-performance data restoration to business users at the application level, including LAN-free, Server-free and Serverless data protection schemes.

About CommVault Systems

CommVault Systems provides unified enterprise data management solutions to ensure high performance data protection, universal availability and simplified management of complex storage networks. The company's singular focus is creating and implementing speedy, simple and seamless solutions to meet customers' data management requirements. The company's software products seamlessly ensure the reliable, rapid restoration of files, business-critical applications and today's most popular databases. Information on CommVault is available on the World Wide Web at www.commvault.com, or by calling 732-870- 4000. CommVault's corporate headquarters is located in Oceanport, New Jersey in the United States.