To most businesses the archiving and management of e-mail is an important task, but that task grows in importance when you are a police authority that is fully accountable to the public and traceability of communications is a vital part of your day-to-day activities. When Leicestershire Police identified a problem with storage capacity for its typical 250,000 e-mails per week, it put out to tender for a new system that would manage the archiving and create additional space on its storage system. The winner of that process was Dacoll with its proposal for Commvault Simpana® 9.
"At one point our e-mail storage capacity was running low, a situation that we were trying to manage as best we could, a situation that was tying up resources," says David Banton, IT Support, at Leicestershire Police. "The decision was made to look at a new system and a tender was drawn up with a weighting system of must haves and would like to haves. Of course, cost was also an issue as we are accountable for every penny that the force spends."
Following a review of all of the submissions by a panel of IT specialists, chief officers, IT management and other users within the organisation Commvault was rated highest in terms of the weighting criteria and, was also the least expensive option. After additional demonstrations by Dacoll, during which further benefits were highlighted, the system was scheduled for installation at the beginning of 2011.
Now, after the system has been live for 12 months, the benefits of the Commvault software are becoming ever more apparent. The driver behind the need to update for Leicestershire Police was that of storage capacity; an area that was addressed by the latest version of Commvault, where users gain space due to its third generation de-duplication solution. This fully integrates source and target-side de-duplication into its unified data management solution, dramatically reducing time-to-backup and the impact on the overall storage environment. In addition, source-side de-duplication eliminates redundant backup and archive data at the client before sending it across networks, servers and storage.
Users can easily extend file de-duplication reduction globally, across thousands of clients having different retention requirements. This all adds up to shorter backup windows, lower management costs, and more robust, reliable data protection. Typical benefits of our Gen 3 de-duplication capabilities include transferring 90 percent less data across the network and maximising data reduction by de-duplicating data globally across hundreds of clients in different locations with different protection policies.
With over 3000 users within Leicestershire Police another benefit of Commvault was its familiar user interface: "Having a system that was familiar to all of our users was a big plus as it dramatically reduced the amount of training that was needed as well as the time to implement the system," says David Banton. "And, while we did experience some issues with indexing the archive for ease of retrieval, which caused a delay in the archiving process, working with Dacoll we overcame these.
The key benefit has been the amount of space that we have freed up, at this point in time we are looking at a reduction in storage space of between 50 and 60 per cent and we are finding that the intuitive nature of Commvault, which the more you use it the more ways it finds of saving space, our storage capacity is no longer reducing."
Other advantages of Commvault software include its independence from the incumbent storage system, so if the user wants to switch from any storage manufacturer, the Commvault data is fully transferrable. The system also provides accurate capacity updates allowing users to plan efficiently what storage is required. In the case of Leicstershire Police the system was purchased with a five year life cycle in terms of space. However, within the first 12 months of operation the Commvault has reduced the space requirement to such an extent that the limited storage space has increased to provide capacity to 2015 and beyond and as the system continues to identify space reductions the existing storage capacity will be beyond that time frame.
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Tags: BC/DR, Tiered Storage |
