ITWire

The local government organisation, with rural surroundings and 43,000 residents on the North Island of New Zealand, is using CommValut’s Simpana 9 software, and according to the council’s Information Services Manager, Jason Simons, there have been reductions in the time required to backup and recover 6 TB of data, and what used to take days to restore now can be recovered in seconds. Simons said the council also relied on Simpana’s embedded deduplication to eliminate redundant data, which further decreased its backup window.

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

According to Simons, Simpana software was one of a handful of technologies considered vitally important to council operations, with the organisation also supporting a Local Authorities Shared Services (LASS) government client services group which delivered a collaborative central archive domain and disaster recovery centre leveraging Simpana to several neighbouring districts, increasing overall IT spend efficiency in the region.

"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."