CommVault opens its doors to the UK

Storage vendor looks for UK partners

US-based storage vendor CommVault launched its UK operations in Reading last week. The company, which provides high-end storage management software, intends to sell 90 per cent of its products through resellers.

CommVault will distribute exclusively through ACD in Scotland and Ireland, and is looking for five distribution partners to serve England.

The firm claims that its flagship Galaxy product line of automatic back-up, archiving and recovery software is highly scaleable, providing storage capacity that grows along with a business.

Paul Liggett, CommVault's managing director for northern Europe, said: "We want to be as channel-centric as possible. CommVault is a software-only company, and we want it to be part of a complete solution."

Liggett claimed that the software allows for the online recovery of a single email in five minutes without having to take any individual component of the network offline. With other products, this process can take up to an entire day to complete. "With one console, we can basically control the whole world," he said.

Paul Mason, vice president of infrastructure and software research at IDC, said that rivals Veritas Software and Legato Systems could have a fight ahead of them because Galaxy has capabilities that other products lack.

For example, it can restore an individual Exchange message without knowing which server it is on. "Their challenge will be to do what Galaxy can do without backing themselves into a dead-end they can't get out of," he said.

However, Chris Boorman, marketing director for Europe, Middle East & Africa at Veritas, said he did not see CommVault as a presence in the marketplace at all.

"In the enterprise space, it is important to have both Windows and Unix solutions. CommVault is a back-up company, but few businesses are looking for just back-up. Veritas products manage an entire storage environment," he said.