Stories about: CommVault

When the dust settled in the lab after two long months of testing Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX in the areas of performance, compatibility, management and security, it all boiled down to two issues: experience and religion.

The need to control and secure a continuing explosion of data across the corporate world is forcing IT managers to constantly be on the lookout for new equipment that can handle perpetually evolving requirements.

These days in IT, you can buy a service for anything - including, once again, your storage.

Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, a US law firm, knows what competing against the big guys is like. Although it has just 135 lawyers and 400 employees overall, its client list includes such heavyweights as Citigroup, Google, HP, the Oakland Raiders football team and Sony Online Entertainment.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced its intentions to acquire Yahoo. Although Yahoo has since announced it plans to fight Microsoft's takeover and court other suitors, most notably Google, there is an element of shared search technology that neither Microsoft nor Yahoo can easily dismiss because of Microsoft's earlier 2008 announcement to acquire FAST Search and Transfer.

Growing companies must break through many barriers, and technology provides barriers aplenty. Moving from a small company storage model to a medium company storage model takes effort, planning and more manpower. For those fighting to get a better handle on their storage resources, CommVault wants to throw you a lifeline.

Companies struggling to contain explosive data growth rates claim continuing backup problems and poor archiving practices are disrupting business operations and contributing to serious storage issues.

My office is in downtown Nashua, N.H. To my west is the Nashua River, and beyond that most of the rest of Nashua and a company called EqualLogic. I came to work Tuesday morning thinking I could hear the sound of a party coming from somewhere on the west side of the river. It was 8:30 a.m., and I dismissed the thought. Then I read the news: Dell buys EqualLogic for $1.4B. I had to read the note more than twice. One point four billion dollars. One billion, four hundred million dollars. I let the number sink in, and then went outside to see if the party was still going on. It was.

Microsoft will release a public beta version of a bundle of server software products for medium-size businesses, code-named "Centro," in the first half of next year.

As Microsoft readies the launch of a second version of its Data Protection Manager storage technology, users disagree on whether it will boost the vendor's position among corporate storage administrators.

Combining backup software and de-duplication technology within virtual server environments can help companies better deal with exploding data growth, according to users attending Computerworld's Storage Networking World conference in the US last week.