CommVault To Support 64-bit Windows, MOM

The Oceanport, N.J.-based software vendor, in which Microsoft took an equity stake a couple of years ago, unveiled the new versions of its software Monday at the Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), in Seattle. The company also said Monday that QiNetix now supports Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM.

Last week, CommVault announced that its QiNetix software supports Microsoft's new Data Protection Manager capabilities. Microsoft's first entry into disk-based backup and recovery, DPM cuts the time required for data backups by backing up changes to the data instead of the entire data set.

Scott Winslow, president of Winslow Technology Group, a Boston-based solution provider and CommVault partner, said it makes sense for storage software vendors like CommVault to support the latest Microsoft functionality.

"Microsoft has been doing so much more in building storage capabilities in their operating systems," he said. "And customers are already starting to talk about 64-bit computing from a performance and a data migration standpoint."

Randy De Meno, director of advanced applications and the Microsoft partnership at CommVault, said his company is adding 64-bit support to its storage software because of Microsoft's expectations that customers will start moving to 64-bit computing by the end of this year.

QiNetix already supports Itanium processors, said De Meno. A version supporting 64-bit Windows on Intel processors is expected to be unveiled soon, followed by a version supporting AMD processors, he said.

By supporting MOM, the new editions of QiNetix can now be used to see traps and management calls into MOM, De Meno said.

Support for DPM, which at the entry level competes with CommVault software, will actually enhance QiNetix's capabilities in the enterprise, said Demo. For instance, data backed up with DPM can then be moved to a tertiary storage array such as low-cost disk, tape or magneto-optical drive using QiNetix. QiNetix can restore such files to any volume level, drive level or file level storage anywhere on the network, he said.