Dave,
Here at Temple University, the enterprise is split into two parts. The first is
the academic side of the house, where we use NetWorker). CommVault is used for
protecting data the second side of the enterprise, the Temple University Health
System. My recently former boss wanted to consolidate backups for the entire
enterprise on a single platform for both the school and the health system. Had
we actually done that, CommVault would have been our choice for various
reasons, mostly because the health system has considerably more clients and
data than the university, so the transition from NetWorker to CommVault would
have been easier than the opposite direction.
At the prodding of my former boss, I met with my two counterparts at the Temple
University Health System, one of whom is a former CommVault employee. They
showed me CommVault and I showed them NetWorker. It did not take long for them
to talk my boss into maintaining status quo. The CommVault people at the Temple
University Health System (we share the same data center) said that since
NetWorker was doing such a great job at protecting the University's data, why
fix what isn't broken? It was them who said that they doubted we would see any
major benefit by making that switch. For us, such a change would have meant
considerable re-training, re-documentation, and so on. A big investment in
hardware and software to do such a transition would have also been necessary to
allow us to run both in parallel while we transitioned to CommVault. We also
priced out some other data protection packages (mainly out of curiosity) and we
kept returning to the conclusion that EMC's BRS offerings!
are the best fit for our data protection needs. YMMV.
So we continue to use NetWorker (and now also Avamar) and they still use
CommVault, but we both side of Temple University's enterprise (academic and
health system) use a lot of EMC primary and secondary storage.
In making this decision, I suggest you ask some basic questions.
1) What problem(s) or deficiencies of NetWorker do you expect CommVault to
bridge?
2) How much money will such a transition cost (including licensing, server and
media server hardware, network infrastructure, staff time, training, developing
internal docs, and revising any internally developed scripts)?
3) Is this transition really worth the cost?
4) What is the risk of failure? Does that risk outweigh any perceived benefits
of switching to a different backup solution?
On Mar 13, 2013, at 7:47 PM, "Werth, Dave" <dave.werth AT GARMIN DOT COM>
wrote:
> I heard today that there is a possibility we may be considering a move to
> CommVault backup later this year. I don't know much about it but I was
> wondering if any of you had any comments on CommVault.
>
> Thanks, Dave
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