Case Study: CI Investments achieves faster disaster recovery and lower storage costs with CommVault Simpana

CI Investments Achieves a Higher Return on Disaster Recovery Preparedness by Standardizing on CommVault Simpana Software

CI Investments, a Toronto‑based subsidiary of CI Financial and one of Canada’s largest investment managers, was struggling with rapid data growth that stretched nightly backups to 11 hours. The firm faced administrative overhead from multiple backup products, slow tape‑based disaster recovery and database refreshes that could take up to two days, inefficient SAN usage, and concerns about the scalability and cost of hardware deduplication.

CI standardized on CommVault Simpana software—integrating backup & recovery, deduplication, replication and archiving—to centralize operations and move from tape to disk‑based protection. The change cut the nightly backup window by 40% (full backups now six hours), reduced data refreshes from 24 to 2 hours and aims for disk restores under two hours; embedded dedupe is reducing storage by ~50%. CI projects more than $1M in storage‑related savings over four years (including ~$288K media/offsite, ~$433K tape and ~$480K archive savings) while improving disaster recovery, scalability and eDiscovery.

CI Investments

Terry Tick

Vice President of Infrastructure Services