Microsoft To Bundle CommVault Simpana With Windows Azure

The new bundle, unveiled Monday, provides access to up to 62 TBs of cloud storage capacity along with CommVault's Simpana 9 Express data protection capabilities for prices starting at about $50,000, said Jeff Echols, CommVault's senior director of product marketing and business development.

"We're trying to address customers' 30-percent to 50-percent per year data growth, where up to 70 percent of data on a disk is either duplicate data or not accessed in over 90 days," Echols said.

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The bundle takes advantage of a cloud connector to move data from a customer's own storage infrastructure to the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud, Echols said. The data is deduplicated, encrypted, and indexed as it is migrated, he said.

The CommVault Simpana software writes natively to the Representational State Transfer, or REST, architecture, which allows it to write data directly to the cloud, said Echols. "So Simpana always knows where the data is," he said.

The bundle can be used for archiving and for backing up data to the cloud, including the full range of Microsoft application environments, while providing integrated reporting and chargeback capabilities, he said.

Customers can upgrade the Simpana software to the full version, in order for Windows Azure cloud to work with data from heterogeneous sources, said Randy Demeno, CommVault's chief technologist for Windows products.

Customers' encryption keys for data archived or backed up on the Windows Azure cloud via CommVault Simpana are kept on premise, Demeno said. "This helps businesses, especially financial companies, remain compliant," he said. "That's a huge benefit for them."

Dewayne Cotten, global ISV businesses development manager for Microsoft, said the bundle is a big opportunity for Microsoft to help make the cloud a bigger part of its business.

The bundle is sold by Microsoft sales reps for now, Cotten said. "But we see possibilities to develop our channel for this offering," he said. "We're looking at offers specific to the channel in the near future."