HP/CommVault partnership scoops BT contract

BT has awarded a large storage management contract to a combined HP/CommVault bid.

The network giant chose CommVault's Simpana storage management software to help reduce operational costs.

BT director for its Global IT Services Centre of Excellence Stan Sexton said: "Our goal with the deal was to enhance the capabilities of BT’s virtualised data centre."

Sexton added that Simpana would simplify and automate storage backup, restore service, deliver reduced costs and improved customer experience."

BT Operate's head of IT technical services Colin Lilburn said: "We run communications services for customers over BT’s core network and Simpana will increase standardisation and automation for our infrastructure operations."

The value of the contract and the amount of storage to be managed were not disclosed, but CommVault is partnering with HP on the five-year agreement to assist BT with transforming data management with increased datacentre virtualisation and tiered storage.

BT will roll out Simpana Backup and Recovery module with centralised management and policy automation to give BT greater visibility and control of its large environment.

This includes more than 6 peta bytes of data and a big Oracle database deployment.

Key among the features Simpana offers is management from a 'single pane of glass', usually from a single network operations centre (NOC) staffed with IT staff from BT and HP.

BT hopes to reduce its capital expenditure costs by not buying extra storage capacity and by using Simpana's deduplication feature. Deduplication decreases redundant data across storage through elimination of multiple copies of the same file.

CommVault's EMEA vice president Steven Rose said that, "Simpana's support for tiered storage will allow cheaper disks to be used for less mission critical business data, whilst enterprise '24 x 7' storage will allow faster access to business data deemed more important."

"We manage storage for shell and European public sector organistions," said Rose, "so we have lots of experience managing large amounts of storage."

Although BT's announced pre-tax profits of £209 million earlier this February, it is currently struggling with a large pensions deficit - £9bn as of December 2008.

The 17-year recovery plan BT hopes to will sort out this problem, means over £500 million per year being set aside to service the deficit, so cost reductions managing storage will be welcome to the UK incumbent.