Let there be light with Commvault Activate

[Preamble: I have been invited by Commvault via GestaltIT as a delegate to their Commvault GO conference from Oct 9-11, 2018 in Nashville, TN, USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid by Commvault, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

Nobody sees well in the dark.

I am piqued and I want to know more about Commvault Activate. The conversation started after lunch yesterday as the delegates were walking back to the Gaylord Opryland Convention Center. I was walking next to Patrick McGrath, one of Commvault marketing folks, and we struck up a conversation in the warm breeze. Patrick started sharing a bit of Commvault Activate and what it could do and the possibilities of many relevant business cases for the solution.

There was a dejà vu moment, bringing my thoughts back to mid-2009. I was just invited by a friend to join him to restructure his company, Real Data Matrix (RDM). They were a NetApp distributor, then Platinum reseller in the early and mid-2000s and they had fell into hard times. Most of their technical team had left them, putting them in a spot to retain one of the largest NetApp support contract in Malaysia at the time.

I wanted to expand on their NetApp DNA and I started to seek out complementary solutions to build on that DNA. Coming out of my gig at EMC, there was an interesting solution which tickled my fancy – VisualSRM. So, I went about seeking the most comprehensive SRM (storage resource management) solution for RDM, one which has the widest storage platforms support. I found Tek-Tools Software and I moved that RDM sign up as their reseller. We got their SE/Developer, Aravind Kurapati, from India to train the RDM engineers. We were ready to hit the market late-2009/early-2010 but a few weeks later, Tek-Tools was acquired by Solarwinds.

Long story short, my mindset about SRM was “If you can’t see your storage resource, you can’t manage your storage“.  Resource visibility is so important in SRM, and the same philosophy applies to Data as well. That’s where Commvault Activate comes in. More than ever, Data Insights is already the biggest differentiator in the Data-Driven transformation in any modern business today. Commvault Activate is the Data Insights that shines the light to all the data in every organization.

After that casual chat with Patrick, more details came up in the early access to Commvault embargoed announcements later that afternoon. Commvault Activate announcement came up in my Twitter feed.

Commvault Activate has a powerful dynamic Index Engine called the Commvault 4D Index and it is responsible to search, discover and learn about different types of data, data context and relationships within the organization. I picked up more information as the conference progressed and found out that the technology behind the Commvault Activate is based on the Apache Lucene Solr enterprise search and indexing platform, courtesy of Lucidworks‘ technology. Suddenly I had a recall moment. I had posted the Commvault and Lucidworks partnership a few months back in my SNIA Malaysia Facebook community. The pictures connected. You can read about the news of the partnership here at Forbes.

Data-driven Insights leads to better decision making, intelligent actionable policies and high-value business outcomes and results. Some of these actions come to mind with Data-driven Insights.

• Identifying and retiring unneeded data, reclaiming storage capacity.
• Move data to a better media for usage such as cloud or tape
• Secure personal identifiable information (PII) and enable policies to comply to regulatory requirements such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations)
• Detection and risk scoring of personal and other sensitive data across unstructured data holdings, that can help to drive remediation, validation of manual processes and uncover additional data blind spots.
• Risk profiling that helps to prioritize risk mitigation plans when faced with data overload.
• Proactive cleanup of unnecessary personal data, directly from the data source and any backup copies.
• Review and approval processes to support the joint decision making required by IT and business units in support of investigations and data subject rights (including access and erasure – right to be forgotten).
• Automated remediation of actions dictated by data subject requests with full audit trails to prove compliance.

I am excited to talk to the Commvault experts later, to learn and develop new understanding about Commvault Activate.

Note 1: In my earlier published piece of this blog, I mentioned about the Commvault Indexing version 2. This was inaccurate and I apologize for the misreporting. I have removed the paragraph. I pride myself to be as accurate as possible. Feel free to comment and feedback.

Note 2: Later in the afternoon, I spoke to Lucidworks directly on the Commvault GO Village pavilion. I learned about inverted indexing and more about the Lucidworks SDK (software development kit) and its integration to create Commvault Activate. Awesome stuff!