CommVault today announced that Ballance Agri-Nutrients, a leading New Zealand farm nutrient manufacturer and distributer, has deployed CommVault Simpana software to enhance data scalability and to enable mobile end-user access to support its increasingly agile and geographically dispersed workforce.

Seamlessly integrating with Ballance’s almost completely virtualised IT environment, Simpana software provides an integrated suite of enterprise-class backup and recovery, data protection and mobility solutions that ensure all critical business data can be securely accessed and recovered by staff members using any mobile device.

CommVault Simpana software is consolidating data from its two physical data centres and 220 virtual machines to centralise data and information management across its entire IT environment. The centralised management and endpoint data protection capabilities of CommVault Edge® technology enables Ballance’s 700 person workforce to rapidly protect, search, and restore data from any remote location on their mobile devices. In addition, moving to a quicker, more centralised solution has the potential to improve recovery speeds of emails and documents from four days to mere minutes.

Tim Lloyd, infrastructure manager at Ballance Agri-Nutrients explained, “The centralised and automated format of Simpana software paired with the on-demand, self-service Edge functionality means that we can recover data easily and immediately — regardless of where it is in our system. That represents a host of tangible productivity and efficiency benefits to the business because the IT team isn’t spending all its time performing tasks that end users can now do themselves.”

This announcement complements Ballance’s commitment to use technology as a driver of innovation across the business. “Technology and the information it delivers is crucial to supporting better business decisions for all stakeholders within our cooperative organisation. CommVault can help support our goals in this area,” said Lloyd.

“CommVault has been working with many organisations across New Zealand that are committed to transforming their data management infrastructure to find better ways to discover, protect and manage their data. Ballance Agri-Nutrients IT transformation will greatly benefit the company and its customers by increasing the efficiency of its backup and recovery operations and by enabling secure access to information by the company’s considerable remote workforce,” said Cory Grant, Country Manager, CommVault New Zealand.

Ballance Agri-Nutrients is a 100percent farmer-owned co-operative with almost 19,000 shareholders throughout New Zealand. Ballance’s approach is to help its customers farm more profitably and sustainably through the provision of complete farm nutrient management advice, products and technology including fertiliser, feed, online farm management and aerial topdressing. Ballance relies on strong back-end technologies to deliver value and ensure best-practice operations for its stakeholders and customers.