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ICOS Biologics Deploys CommVault's Data Protection and Archive Software

(Dec 18,2007)--CommVault announced that ICOS Biologics, a developer and manufacturer of therapeutic proteins for early clinical trials of biopharmaceuticals, has deployed CommVault Simpana 7.0 data protection and archive software for simplified, enterprise-class data backup and recovery along with integrated data archiving and migration for dramatically improved legal discovery, compliance and storage management.

A core responsibility for the company’s IT department is preserving emails, files and backup tapes to ensure compliance with various industry regulations, including FDA, Sarbanes-Oxley and new amendments to the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP). ICOS also adheres to Good Manufacturing Practice & Quality Service Regulations (GxP), a set of legal requirements for quality assurance, control principles and standards for drug manufacturing. According to ICOS, their existing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) platform was complicated, difficult to administer and didn’t support integrated archiving and migration capabilities. As a result, ICOS outsourced all legal discoveries. The discoveries cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and often took months to complete.

In an effort to replace its existing TSM solution with a simpler yet more robust data protection platform, ICOS evaluated all the major software products based on a set of criteria, including a centralized console for all data protection functions, ease of configuration and daily use with its tape library, message-level recovery for Exchange, policy-driven backup and restore procedures, as well as integrated archiving and migration. A review of the alternatives led ICOS to decide that CommVault’s Simpana 7.0 software best fit its data protection, compliance and discovery requirements.

CommVault’s Simpana 7.0 software enables ICOS to leverage a singular approach to data protection, Exchange archive and data migration. According to Rob Rees, senior systems architect for ICOS, the ability to use a single, centralized console for managing daily backups, restores, email archives and data migrations is welcomed relief. “CommVault has completely alleviated the pain of backup and recovery while enabling us to make significant strides in meeting compliance and discovery demands,” he says. “Doing all this from a unified console is the key to our success. It makes so much sense and saves so much time in training and daily management.”

With CommVault technology, backup administration is now automated, requiring less than 10 minutes each day versus the three hours ICOS previously needed with TSM. Restores are nearly instantaneous and with the added benefit of granular recoveries. Archiving brings the ability to manage and retain important company assets such as emails and files across repositories such as email servers, collaboration servers, and file servers. It also provides management of not only archived data, but online file system and backup data as well. CommVault Content Indexing allows rich content search across all data from all managed sources including emails and attachments from archives and backup copies.

As a result, ICOS now handles its own e-discovery requests instead of relying on expensive outsourcing solutions. “We can easily accommodate any e-discovery requests,” adds Rees. “We simply get a set of search terms from our lawyers, plug them in for the search and get the results. It’s so easy and fast compared to what we had to do previously—not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars saved by doing it ourselves.”

CommVault’s self-service search and legal discovery lets ICOS’ legal staff conduct its own searches across online, backup and archive data copies. Additionally, enhanced data migration functionality has lowered the time and effort of performing email and network file clean-ups. Previously, it took the company approximately 16-to-20 hours to configure a network clean-up and nearly six hours to set up an email migration. With CommVault software, it now takes 10 minutes to start email and network file migration jobs.

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