Case Study: Australian Government Comcare

Case Study: Australian Government Comcare COMCARE ENSURES BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND EFFICIENT DATA MANAGEMENT WITH COMMVAULT COMMVAULT VIRTUALISATION PROTECTION SOLUTIONS STREAMLINE RECORDS RETENTION AND ARCHIVING FOR WORKPLACE SAFETY AGENCY. CHALLENGE • Legacy solution required backup agents on each server. Workload was too much for small internal IT team. Industry Australian Government Agency

• Comcare needed a scalable and sustainable data management and DR solution.

Corporate Headquarters Canberra, ACT

SOLUTION

www.comcare.gov.au

• Backup • Email archiving • Deduplication • Virtual server protection • Disaster recovery BENEFITS • Can now identify and quickly retain on disk any email from or to a specific person, creating a powerful solution for record activity • Easy-to-manage solution can grow with the virtualized environment • Deduplication significantly reduced primary disk usage • Commvault software can leverage existing SAN infrastructure. • Business continuity is assured and more economical

More than 350,000 Australians who enjoy safe, secure work environments depend daily on Comcare, the Government Agency that administers and supports workplace safety, rehabilitation and compensation. Managing vast amounts of data and ensuring client privacy was a constant challenge for Comcare’s Technology team, who support many applications and three operating systems that operate on a range of hardware. More than 700 staff and field agents located in offices around the nation require around-the-clock services, along with an information platform that provides secure, private and robust data management. To meet this challenge, Comcare undertook a major information systems transformation, which tackled everything from the data centre to the desktop to disaster recovery, harnessing virtualization to implement a sophisticated information management framework. Comcare needed a scalable and reliable solution to help meet future needs as the agency continues to roll out additional services for external stakeholders and clients, such as the digitisation and archival of records for compliance requirements. Commvault® Simpana® software was selected to meet the challenge due to its ability to deliver greater data reliability, information security, improved control of data reserves, scalability and better business continuity.

FLEXIBLE, MODERN DATA PROTECTION FOR VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENT Simpana software seamlessly protects Comcare’s physical and virtualized servers, making it easy to switch to a virtual IT infrastructure. More than 250 virtual machines (VM), including five Oracle clusters and five SQL clusters, run on standardised hardware within Comcare’s environment. Commvault’s flexible approach to protecting physical and virtual machines meant Comcare could replace their aging storage system with standardized hardware to reduce costs and simplify management, by avoiding installing backup agents on each VM. When Comcare reviewed alternatives, it was clear that the final solution needed to be easy to use with minimal administrative overhead. The Comcare Technology team explained, “With a mission to completely virtualize our environment, not having to install agents on the server and run backups for our VMware infrastructure was the main consideration and one of the best benefits for using Commvault.”

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Virtual Server Protection: Buyer’s Checklist1 Find out how Commvault can reduce costs and complexity with your VM Backup and Recovery solution in this buyer’s checklist.

Along with a simpler user interface, Simpana software is a much richer and more powerful tool, allowing multiple configuration options. The VMware vCenter plug-in for Commvault also allows many data protection-related tasks to be managed centrally, streamlining the workload of virtualization admins. Simpana software provides high scalability, availability and resiliency to Comcare’s virtualized infrastructure. Any time a new VM is rolled out, it is backed up automatically, without manual intervention, leveraging storage already available on existing arrays. The Comcare Technology team added, “The way that Commvault integrates into our virtual environments and lets us quickly bring back a VM from a point in time has been pretty much flawless. It assures us that the backup data that we’re retaining is valid and that, in the event of a disaster or in the event of an application failure, we’re able to quickly recover both. So, we can recover a virtual machine, we can recover a volume for a virtual machine, down to an individual file on those virtual machines. It’s the set-and-forget nature of those VM backups that are the main benefit for Comcare. We don’t have to worry about configuring back-up agents when we deploy new services. They just get picked up and backed up.” Comcare backs up about 280 GB of data per day and the organization credits Simpana software’s deduplication capability with delivering more than 60 percent space savings. The agency currently has about 20 TB of storage available and its disk libraries are at 70 percent of capacity. Data growth meanwhile is running at 20-30 percent a year spurred by Comcare’s virtualization push, which allows swift deployment of new services and applications. The agency has also moved to a more mature development test cycle with dedicated development, test and staging.

DISASTER RECOVERY TESTING FOR AFFORDABLE BUSINESS CONTINUITY

“The way that Commvault integrates into our virtual environments and lets us quickly bring back a VM from a point in time has been pretty much flawless. We are now confident that the backup data that we’re retaining is valid and that in the event of a disaster or application failure, we’re able to quickly recover both at any level.” COMCARE TECHNOLOGY TEAM

In a nutshell, Simpana software has simplified Comcare’s backup infrastructure and slashed the agency’s costs by providing flexible options for disaster recovery. To enable a cost-effective business continuity strategy, Comcare relies on Commvault’s ability to support any storage tier including tape, disk and cloud. The Comcare Technology team explained, “We have no issues with scalability when we change our virtualization infrastructure. With our existing hardware and Commvault, we’ll be able to save millions of dollars in our disaster recovery solution while accommodating the growth we’re expecting over the next two to three years.”

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The Comcare Technology team praised the deployment of the solution adding, “We managed to complete the installation within budget and have reduced our overhead to maintain the solution going forward. Commvault Professional Services was of great assistance in testing disaster recovery and operations. Commvault’s IT support shop has probably been one of the best we have dealt with. The process has always been fast and straightforward, from logging calls to getting solutions.”

COMCARE AT-A-GLANCE PLATFORM/FILE SYSTEM • Microsoft Windows Server • VMware vSphere APPLICATIONS

RESOURCES 1 commvault.com/resource-library/54466d43096e133eff00068b/virtual-serverprotection-buyers-checklist.pdf

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