Onstream’s implementation of CommVault Simpana reduces IT issues

Trying to find data once was a nightmare for the IT department of Tasmanian-based shared services company, Onstream.

The company, which provides IT services for three state water authorities, Southern Water, Cradle Mountain Water and Ben Lomond Water, had four separate data management products and was handling 17 terabytes of user data.

Onstream ICT manager, David Byrne, said that if a user wanted something recovered, the first thing his staff would do was “panic and try to figure out where it was.”

To overcome this, the company went to market for a new offering in mid-2011 and decided to install CommVault Simpana backup and recovery.

“It ended up being the best offering in terms of price and capability,” he said. “I was after a single view of the end-to-end data management and protection problem.”

Since the implementation, IT issues for staff have reduced and sanity has improved, according to Byrne.

"It’s allowed us to provide things like data recovery services much more quickly. In the past, if one of the corporations needed something restored it often took longer than needed to.”

He added that the company now keeps a month’s worth of data on disc for recovery purposes.

The implementation has also helped Onstream meet its Archives Act requirements, as it must retain data from the three state water authorities under the Act.

The length of time it has to hold this data can range from seven to 100 years depending if it is a development or asset data.

IT staff have now been able to carry out new projects such as application standardisation across the three state water corporations. For example, each corporation has standardised on the same Geographic Information System (GIS) platform.

Onstream is also in the process of a desktop virtualization project involving 700 desktop computers.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU

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