Crutchfield Turns Up the Volume on Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange Data Management with CommVault Simpana

Business Wire, Nov 29, 2007

Tight Integration with Microsoft Leads to Item-Level Recovery of SharePoint and Exchange Data and Dramatically Reduced Administrative Overhead and Backup Windows

OCEANPORT, N.J. -- CommVault[R] (NASDAQ:CVLT) today announced that Crutchfield Corp., the nation's first integrated marketer of consumer electronics products, has slashed the time it takes to do full backups and restores by switching to CommVault software from Symantec. Crutchfield has deployed CommVault Galaxy[R] Data Protection, one of several modules that comprise the CommVault Simpana(TM) software suite, to streamline backups and restores of vital data while also providing tight integration with Microsoft applications to deliver heightened data protection.

As one of the most respected authorities on car and home entertainment products, Crutchfield consistently earns industry accolades for the quality, design and usefulness of its award-winning catalog, call center and popular e-commerce website. Technology has played a major role at Crutchfield since the company launched the first vendor-authorized audio/video Internet shopping destination. Today, a 14-person IT infrastructure team oversees 120 Microsoft servers running Windows 2003, SQL Server 2005, Exchange 2003 and SharePoint Portal Server 2007. The company also supports a growing storage environment comprising EMC SANs and 8 terabytes of storage that continues to increase by approximately 15 percent each year.

After a storage growth spurt overtaxed the company's existing backup and recovery foundation, Crutchfield decided to deploy best-of-class disk-to-disk-to-tape hardware and more robust data protection software. The evaluation of competing software alternatives coincided with a deployment of Microsoft SharePoint, which added item-level recovery of SharePoint files to its top selection criteria. As one of the first vendors to support this level of granular backup and recovery for SharePoint, CommVault was selected over Symantec Veritas NetBackup and EMC Networker, both of which would have required Crutchfield to rebuild an entire SharePoint system offline from tape for restores. In contrast, CommVault's first SharePoint recovery took less than an hour.

According to Steve Weiskircher, vice president of information technology for Crutchfield, CommVault's seamless SharePoint support has expedited upgrades to newer releases, optimized overall data management and reduced administrative overhead substantially. "CommVault is our corporate standard for backup and recovery," he says. "It gives us great peace of mind knowing they are in lock-step with Microsoft while continuing to keep pace with the latest technology advancements to give Crutchfield unprecedented levels of data protection."

Crutchfield has taken advantage of CommVault's multi-streaming capability to reduce backup times from 48 hours to about five hours, enabling the IT team to incorporate less-critical data and still achieve significant reductions in daily backups. Major improvements on restores also were achieved as the time to recover data shrank from several hours to about 30 minutes. In addition to SharePoint, item-level recovery of Exchange files provides fast restores of full mailboxes, individual items and extended Outlook information, such as contacts, calendars and tasks.

Crutchfield also leverages CommVault's on-the-fly tape encryption to ensure complete compliance with Payment Card Industry (PCI) regulations while its "set it and forget it" operation and system-state backup feature have virtually eliminated administrative overhead. As a result, the company has freed resources to focus on more strategic technology initiatives, including a recently completed SharePoint 2007 upgrade as well as a planned migration to Exchange 2007.

CommVault's proven Microsoft prowess extends to SQL Server, which Crutchfield is considering as part of a singular approach to data management. Additionally, Crutchfield is reviewing the technology advances of CommVault's latest Simpana software suite, especially its enterprise-wide search and discovery feature for strengthening compliance, auditing and archival capabilities.

About Crutchfield

Crutchfield Corporation, which celebrates its 33rd anniversary in 2007, is the nation's first integrated marketer (catalog, call center, and Internet) of consumer electronics products. Since its introduction in 1974, the Crutchfield catalog has been a respected authority on car and home entertainment products, winning multiple awards for quality, design, and usefulness. Crutchfield's Sales, Customer Service and Technical Advisors are noted for their high integrity, product expertise, and technical support. They are available by phone, e-mail, and live online chat. Crutchfield.com offers a convenient, full-service shopping destination to buyers of car and home audio/video products. Crutchfield was the first vendor-authorized audio/video retailer on the Internet and has been recognized for call center operation customer satisfaction excellence under the J.D. Power and Associates Certified Call Center Program(SM). It is also one of only two retailers to have won BizRate's coveted "Circle of Excellence" award eight times.