The enhancement allows the indexing and searching of OneDrive for Business documents saved on Azure Stack hybrid clouds, something that will have strong relevance for compliance use cases.
Randy De Meno., in his other role as Captain of the Commvault hockey team, which raises money for children’s charities with their games
Data protection vendor Commvault has expanded its integration with Microsoft Azure Stack. The key enhancement is to Commvault’s support of Office 365, enabling both the indexing and searching of OneDrive for Business documents saved on Azure Stack hybrid clouds. New Compliance Apps also permit the discovery, monitoring, and managing of personally identifiable information on Azure Stack. In addition, Commvault is emphasizing the significance of recent improvements like the new Live Sync for Microsoft SQL Server for Azure Stack.
“Commvault is in a unique position to offer a single data management platform, which can leverage the same features and functionality and code on a Windows server in the enterprise, as we have been doing for 20 years, on a Windows VM, or public Azure, or running natively in Azure Stack,” said Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist, Microsoft Products and Microsoft Partnerships, at Commvault. “It’s a huge benefit, and a confidence boost for the customer.”
DeMeno, who has been with Commvault since 1994, has witnessed the long, 18-year relationship between the two companies.
“We have had a successful and storied relationship with Microsoft, since the days when we abandoned a hardware solution running a version of Unix for Windows,” he said. “We have supported Azure since Day One – back when it was called Microsoft Cloud Services – and integrate with it seamlessly to take advantage of their compute power. We regularly share our road maps with Microsoft, and have benefited from strong working relationships with Microsoft executives who share the same vision as us.”
DeMeno said that the new ability to both index and search OneDrive for Business documents saved on Azure Stack hybrid clouds is the big deal here.
“That’s the key new feature, which expands our Office 365 support, and which also enables the search of other applications like Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint,” DeMeno said. “It goes beyond what Microsoft provides out of the box. While it is most optimal to do this in Azure itself, it’s still critical to have the capability on-prem, which give the customer a heterogeneous enterprise-wide storage-agnostic eDiscovery and Search. And it’s the same software, that we run in public Azure, while still having traditional components running in Azure Stack. We also run natively, not just in guest mode, to take full advantage of the Azure Stack compute power.”
The impending deadline for adherence to the EU’s strict GDPR privacy law is a consideration here, DeMeno added.
“That’s a key component,” he said. “It’s critical for a customer to easily enable eDiscovery and Search in Azure Stack, when multinational GDPR requirements are involved.”
GDPR requirements are also addressed by new Commvault Compliance Apps that enable discovery, monitoring, and management of personally identifiable information on Azure Stack. These apps let administrators quickly process data requests from end-users and meet other data privacy regulatory requirements.
In addition, Commvault’s Live Sync for Microsoft SQL Server, introduced earlier this year, automatically replicates changes captured by backups for a production SQL database on an Azure Stack private cloud to another SQL server, after every backup job, without any additional overhead to the production server.
DeMeno stressed that Azure Stack is a strong channel play for Commvault partners.
“They can help their customers move their workloads from on-prem to Azure,” he said. “Over the past couple years, we have focused more on Commvault as a managed service, and we see this as helping them work with customers in their migration to the cloud. The same will apply as a SaaS play, which I see becoming an increasingly significantly opportunity for partners.”
