CASE STUDY
safeguard the manufacturing supply chain,”
said Azam. a streamlined platform that would ensure
simple, local, centralised management.
“We are proud to expand our longstanding
relationship with Emirates Steel by adding
our latest HyperScale functionality and
flexibility,” added Wael Mustafa, Area Vice
President Middle East, South Africa and
Turkey at Commvault. How did the system integrate with
your existing infrastructure?
“Our HyperScale solutions are offering
increased data availability and business
continuation assurance to many of the
largest organisations across the region.”
We spoke to Mohammed Azam, IT
Infrastructure Head at Emirates Steel, to
find out more about the challenges the
organisation was looking to address ahead
of selecting Commvault and the main
benefits of the solutions.
What challenges were you
trying to address ahead of
selecting Commvault?
We are doing an entire backup of SAP
ERP data, as well as the files for each
server utilised by every user across all our
separate departments.
The previous solution that we had was
unable to handle large data backup jobs,
especially backup to disks and with no
protection to SAP MaxDB.
The document library, which contains
extremely confidential information and acts
as our central depository, was growing so
large that it was becoming inefficient.
The solution provided by Commvault
introduced a new milestone for effective
data storage, allowing us to free up 60%
of space previously occupied by redundant
data and more reliability to the backup to
disks and full proof solution to SAP MaxDB.
Why did you choose Commvault and
these solutions?
Positioned as an efficient and competitive
producer of finished steel products as well
as a continuously growing and diversifying
business within the industry, Emirates
Steel required a data storage and recovery
solution that would provide seamless
access to vast amounts of data as well as
www.intelligentcio.com
It was a seamless integration; we did not
face any issues integrating Commvault to
our existing infrastructure, as the platform
was VMware-ready in terms of its own
command console (Commserve) hosting and
additional capability to perform VMware
guest backups with granular recovery.
Commvault had IntelliSnap feature
capability to perform storage Snapshot
backups with a pre-built agent supporting
our compellent storage. It also had all the
agents to cover end-to-end application
protection coverage.
Were there any challenges
encountered during the
installation process – if so, how
were these addressed?
We did not face any challenges during the
installation process; there were few hiccups,
but Emirates Steel has 24/7 support from
Commvault and direct engagement with its
professional services team.
It has really been an excellent service
provider with a very prompt response time.
Commvault also helped us to set up a
Disaster Recovery tool which provided very
good engagement for our requirements.
How far has the system future-
proofed your organisation?
Emirates Steel has a clear go-ahead to
move backup to the cloud. However, as
a government entity, the organisation
has to comply with National Electronic
Security Authority (NESA) regulations. This
could potentially be implemented with
Commvault immediately with the Amazon
Cloud Go-Live announcement which
happened in June 2019.
This falls in line with the UAE government’s
focus on digitisation and moving towards
more productive and efficient systems of
operation. Commvault is cloud-ready to
support and protect our upcoming projects
such as SAP HANA migration and Microsoft
M365. We can easily protect the data of our
applications moving to in-country cloud.
Are there any trends you expect to
see within the data centre space
going forward?
To support a move to the cloud, the demand
for large data centres is on the rise with
increased hardware efficiency, lower energy
consumption, lower data centre footprint
and data centre immersion cooling.
But enterprise data centres are beginning
to come into question, as companies that
currently manage their own data centre
space begin to explore cloud hosting options.
With all of this cloud shift happening, people
have a misconception that anything in cloud
is protected – with the cloud journey the
demand to locally back up and protect data
will tremendously increase.
With cloud backup ready, I see a good future
for data protection companies in this space.
For Commvault customers the Scale-Out
HyperScale Appliance is a best fit in this
scenario, as it is going to act as a one-stop
shop to locally protect and test cloud data. n
OUR HYPERSCALE SOLUTIONS
ARE OFFERING INCREASED DATA
AVAILABILITY AND BUSINESS
CONTINUATION ASSURANCE TO MANY
OF THE LARGEST ORGANISATIONS
ACROSS THE REGION.
INTELLIGENTCIO
57