CommVault Opens Door to iSCSI

CommVault Systems Inc. today officially jumped into the IP SAN backup market by announcing iSCSI support for its QiNetix software suite (see CommVault Supports iSCSI).

CommVault qualified its Galaxy disk-to-disk backup technology, which is part of its QiNetix suite, on iSCSI devices from StoneFly Networks Inc., LeftHand Networks, and EqualLogic Inc.

The strategy for Oceanport, N.J.-based CommVault is to provide iSCSI data protection to organizations where Fibre Channel never made financial sense or smaller and midsized business that lacked the administrative resources to embrace Fibre Channel SANs. Backing up and restoring data disk-to-disk on iSCSI is faster and cheaper than moving the data via Fibre Channel.

"We worked with our hardware vendors to qualify our products and theirs to allow people to take advantage of networked storage without the expense of a full Fibre Channel infrastructure," says Chris Van Wagoner, CommVaults director of product marketing. "The significance here is you’re seeing the first vendors come to market with qualified iSCSI solutions that end users can purchase."

After a languorous start out of the gate, iSCSI is finally picking up momentum. After the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) approved the spec in February 2003, one of the biggest boosts for the long-in-arriving technology has come from Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq: MSFT) release this summer of an iSCSI driver for Windows (see iSCSI Gets Go-Ahead, Microsoft Sparks iSCSI Liftoff, and Panel: iSCSI Clear for Takeoff).The Galaxy backup and recovery software works with StoneFly's D2D backup IP SANs, LeftHand’s IP SAN product, and EqualLogic’s PeerStorage array. CommVault has also certified the software for Spectra Logic Corp.'s tape libraries; Spectra Logic was the first tape vendor in the industry to introduce iSCSI support (see CommVault OKs Spectra Logic iSCSI and Spectra Logic Pulls iSCSI Trigger).

Another tape array library vendor, Overland Storage Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL), has driven hard on backup-over-iSCSI, acquiring startup Okapi Software earlier in June of this year (see Overland Captures Okapi).

Last week, CommVault announced QiNetix 5.0, which includes new DataArchiver software and enhancements to the Galaxy Backup/Recovery, QiNetix DataMigrator, and QiNetix Quick Recovery products. QiNetix 5.0 software components are expected to be available in early November, with component pricing starting at $795 (see CommVault Announces QiNetix 5.0).

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch