Case Study: Columbia Sportswear Company achieves enterprise data management and faster Exchange & VMware backups with Commvault Simpana

Columbia College Chicago Graduates to Enterprise Data Management with CommVault’s Best-of-Class Simpana Software

Columbia College Chicago, a large private arts and media college with nearly 12,500 students and a complex IT environment of physical and virtual servers, faced rapidly doubling storage growth as it migrated to Exchange and SharePoint 2007 and increased virtualization. The IT team needed to simplify backups, centralize archiving, meet escalating eDiscovery demands, and consolidate remote backups to improve disaster recovery while reducing the administrative burden of multiple tape libraries.

The college deployed CommVault Simpana — including Backup & Recovery, Deduplication, the Universal Virtual Server Agent, Archive, Search and Replication — to centralize management and automate protection. Results included a >50% reduction in backup windows (full Exchange backups under seven hours), restore times cut from ~50 hours to ~30 minutes, eDiscovery response times reduced to about 10 minutes, automated VM protection, deduplication across disk/tape to curb storage growth, and self-serve search for legal staff that freed IT resources.

Columbia Sportswear Company

Matt Piccirilli

System Administrator