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Storage Manager 7.0 Product Overview A CommVault White Paper:
Storage Manager 7.0
Abstract
CommVault Storage Manager software simplifies storage resource administration by discovering, tracking, analyzing,
trending, and reporting on primary storage use. Storage Manager links this information to the host system and
application simplifying understanding and management of data. As a result, IT can meet storage service level agreements
for different classes of data; lowering costs, optimizing utilization, and measuring storage service levels.
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A CommVault White Paper:

Storage Manager 7.0 -
Increasing Efficiency Through Resource Management

Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 2
Becoming Proactive ........................................................................................................................ 2
Seeing the Big Picture..................................................................................................................... 3
Leveraging Storage Manager.......................................................................................................... 4
Using the Right Tools ..................................................................................................................... 4
SCENARIO 1: Managing Disk Usage........................................................................................ 5
SCENARIO 2: Addressing File and Quota Violations............................................................... 6
SCENARIO 3: Eliminating Stale Data ....................................................................................... 7
SCENARIO 4: Managing Database Growth .............................................................................. 8
SCENARIO 5: Managing Application Data............................................................................... 9
SCENARIO 6: Implementing a Total Data Management Strategy .......................................... 11
Storage Resource Management..................................................................................................... 13
Singular Information Management ....................................................................................... 13
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 14
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Introduction
CommVault develops a suite of products designed to protect, archive, replicate, manage
and search your valuable data; however this is only part of the CommVault® approach to
Singular Information Management. With the ever growing emphasis on reducing costs
and maintaining compliance, it is no longer efficient or acceptable to treat all data types with
the same value when it comes to provisioning storage or implementing backup and archival
strategies. Yet, before you can begin to construct a plan to reliably and efficiently manage
your data through its lifecycle, you must first have a clear understanding of the type,
amount, location and level of importance or sensitivity of the data.

The purpose of this document is to familiarize you with how CommVault Storage Manager
software can help automate and simplify data management within your organization.
Storage Manager is a Storage Resource Management (SRM) solution that provides you
with an application- or data-centric view of your environment, broken out by file type, age
and/or size. Further data analysis with Storage Manager will provide you with an
understanding of location, owner and storage cost so that you can begin to get a clear
picture of the state or your current storage environment. Storage Manager takes the guess
work out of SRM by providing automated advisories, which warn of potential problems and
suggest resolutions based on common Best Practices. Predictive trending, another key
feature, relies on historical volume and application data growth to predict future resource
consumption so that you can plan accordingly. It is this level of insight into the data residing
on your production storage systems that enables you to make informed decisions on how to
best protect and manage your data in compliance with regulations and corporate policies,
while staying within departmental budgets.

Becoming Proactive
The concepts behind data and storage management have been around for some time. Even
the most junior IT administrator can perform basic storage management functions, for a
limited number of servers, without the need of third-party software products. So you may
ask, Why should I purchase an SRM product?

The concept of SRM typically means different things to different individuals based on
position and job responsibilities. A Systems Administrators needs may vary somewhat to
those of a Database Administrator and be entirely different to the needs of Capacity
Planners and IT Management. It is this ability to deliver on a set of varied requirements that
makes SRM products so valuable to an organization.

So Why SRM? really isnt the question you should be asking yourself. Since you already
know there is a need to manage your storage resources; it becomes more of a question of
Can I afford to have my personnel spending significant time and resources to track
down storage related problems and statistics?, especially when the simple
implementation of one tool such as Storage Manager could free them to manage issues
proactively, leaving them available to work on other, more critical issues.
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When you really take a close look at your environment, the answer should be pretty simple!
If an administrator is only managing a handful of servers on a single platform with only a few
hundred gigabytes of data, they can be very proactive and proficienteven when using
native tools, custom scripts and the application consoles that came with the storage system.
However, as the size of the environment changes from five servers to fifty to one-hundred
or even a thousandplus servers, the number of platforms, applications and Terabytes of
data are likely to increase disproportionately to the number of administrators. In these larger
environments, IT personnel are expected to work more efficiently. The native tools, custom
scripts and application consoles become cumbersome and unwieldy due to their inability to
scale. So without the insight that a unified SRM product brings, administrators tend to react
to storage problems, struggling to resolve issues only after they occur. In these
environments, SRM is no longer an option; it is now a business necessity.

Seeing the Big Picture
CIOs and other senior IT managers face an extraordinary challenge of overseeing the
management of the information their organizations create. All the while, storage networks
are becoming more complexas alternatives like SATA, SAS, iSCSI, NAS, SAN, and other
architectures are introducedmaking pinpointing data locations more and more difficult.
Then, factor in the needs to simply discover storage assets and ensure storage services for
business critical applications, and the potential for problems swells to extraordinary
proportions.

As the bandwidth of IT personnel stretches thin, problem solutions have a tendency to
address only the immediate problem and fail to identify or consider the issues root cause.
For example, you may not able to complete backup operations within an allotted window.
You might consider implementing a new backup software package, upgrading to larger and
faster tape devices or even expanding