Cisco : Make Your Data Work for You with ScaleProtect X from Commvault and Cisco

As the explosion of enterprise data continues, IT is faced with the question of where to store it. On one hand, primary storage provides the fastest access, but it comes with a relatively high price tag.

On the other hand, secondary storage systems are less expensive, but they typically rest on proprietary, purpose-built platforms that don't integrate with other systems-often trapping data in silos. This situation creates complexity for IT, because it's difficult to share data among these silos. The net result is that this data is often disconnected from the production data infrastructure, making it difficult to extract value from what should be one of a company's most important resources. Scalability is another challenge: As data grows in volume, forklift upgrades to existing data infrastructure are often required to create additional capacity.

Your objective, of course, is to gain insights and value from this data at minimum cost and complexity. But how?

ScaleProtect from Commvault and Cisco

Back in 2017, Cisco and partner Commvault recognized this challenge and brought the integrated ScaleProtect data protection and management solution to market. ScaleProtect combines the flexible, modular, and scalable Cisco UCS servers with the Commvault HyperScale architecture for secure enterprise-level data management.

Consider this scenario: A leading university was challenged by 50 percent annual growth of its secondary data storage. In addition, the university had limited ability to scale capacity, struggled with managing multiple storage solutions, and had limited visibility into its data. By deploying the ScaleProtect solution, the institution was able to reduce its footprint and infrastructure, deliver predictable scale, simplify storage management, and cut overall costs.

As another example, a major healthcare provider struggled with low storage utilization and high costs, which translated into receiving low value for its storage investment. It also experienced poor visibility into its data. By implementing the ScaleProtect solution, the provider consolidated its data center by a 5-to-2 ratio. It also put in place a policy-driven rapid decision-making workflow, reduced administrative overhead, and eliminated 60% of its required scripting.

Next-generation scale-out data protection and management

Now, Cisco and Commvault have built on the success of ScaleProtect to bring ScaleProtect X, a next-generation platform, to market. With ScaleProtect X, you can deploy a scale-out architecture. And because you can easily expand capacity one node at a time, you don't need to overprovision your environment in anticipation of future requirements. With ScaleProtect X, you can tier data seamlessly to a multicloud ecosystem and manage workloads running on premises, in hybrid cloud, and in multi-cloud environments as a single entity.

Users of ScaleProtect X gain greater resilience, because the solution automatically balances the load across all nodes. And as new nodes are added to the environment, it automatically redistributes the load. This capability provides predictable performance, regardless of scale- where legacy solutions tend to experience performance degradation as capacity upper limits are approached. Likewise, if a node goes down for any reason, ScaleProtect X automatically redistributes the data, greatly impacting uptime.

In addition, ransomware protection is built into the solution, using artificial intelligence and machine learning to continuously monitor storage systems for anomalous behavior. If such behavior is detected, you can be automatically alerted and network connections deactivated.

Enterprise-class support

With an enterprise solution comes support through a single point of contact. Customers with Cisco Solutions Support make their first call Cisco. Cisco then works directly with Commvault, if necessary, to resolve issues. In fact, ScaleProtect X does not use third-party plugins, which eliminates the risk of finger-pointing. Other solutions rely on third-party plugins to add capability such as support for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, or Kubernetes deployments.

Ease of management

The ScaleProtect platform simplifies overall management. Our customers use Cisco Intersight to manage hardware and Commvault Hyperscale to manage data. This approach provides a unified view of the data regardless of where it lives-in contrast to solutions that rely on a plethora of tools to manage the storage environment.

Ease of use translates into real cost savings. One customer found that backups requiring an FTE 1.5 days were performed by ScaleProtect X in less than 30 minutes. The result was a savings of US$2.5 million over three years.

ScaleProtect X enables users to extract value from their data-regardless of how much there is and where it resides-to support critical decision making. With its scale-out architecture, they can easily add capacity one node at a time to achieve a cloud-like economy of scale for on-premise environments.

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