CommVault today announced the University of Tasmania has chosen the Simpana 10 platform as part of its strategic IT roadmap, which gives students, academic staff and researchers a self-service and mobile platform for current and future data management needs.

As part of a continuing strategic partnership via an extended agreement signed with CommVault, the University of Tasmania will roll out a Simpana software powered central data management platform supporting information needs for around 19,000 students as well as research and academic staff. This will, for the first time, provide automated access to large amounts of data and research information on any device, at any time, via highly secure self-service portals on and off the network.

"Information management requirements in the Australian education sector are becoming more demanding and increasingly these data sets are coming under the regulation of Federal and State legislation."  Said Bryan Stibbard, Area-Vice President ANZ, CommVault. "At the same time student data sets are increasing in size and there is more demand for that content to be discoverable and usable from almost any device.  By being able to do everything from managing access policies to implementing legal hold or compliance searches - all from a centralised Simpana console, we are proud that CommVault has been able to assist University of Tasmania across the full spectrum of its data management requirements."

According to Richard Eccles, Associate Director (Strategy, Innovation and Architecture) at University of Tasmania, the partnership with CommVault is the next step to extend the university's current BYOD capabilities and give students more ways to access the content they create and the information they need to consume.

With CommVault Simpana software the University's researchers can also collect, protect and efficiently manage many terabytes of data each week, while also making their findings more accessible.  Various external researchers, Tasmanian fisheries and other land organisations are then using this data to make critical environmental maintenance decisions and policies.   

"Until now, many of the University of Tasmania affiliated research groups have struggled with managing and presenting large volumes of critical information in a way that our audiences want to see it," explains Mr Eccles. "For instance our research groups need to present many terabytes of information from the intelligent sensor network.  This data covers elements like sea levels, marine health and soil temperature and since implementing CommVault's Simpana software, we have empowered them to provide more detailed, 'real-time' data, quicker than was possible before."

As part of a long-term strategic partnership, CommVault will also assist University of Tasmania with the development of its cloud strategy, including provisioning the transition of its heavily virtualised Windows environment. This will enhance the University of Tasmania's current data management policies with high performance, high availability cloud infrastructure. In addition, the requirements on the University's datacentres are reduced, as Simpana softwares's storage tiering tools means cloud, tape on-premise storage targets are always most appropriately and cost-effectively allocated. 

To maintain industry compliance, the CommVault software will closely align privacy and security functions with the requirements of a newly formed University of Tasmania Data Governance Group. Concerned with the custodianship and classification of private and public data, they will use Simpana software to determine which data sets are priorities for the cloud and which can be managed via a another tier of storage.

"In choosing CommVault, we have selected a partner with the specific compliance expertise and software tools to address our long-term strategic data needs.  Providing and managing quality information is a key objective in our ten year Information Strategic Plan," said Mr Eccles.  "Looking ahead, CommVault's archiving capabilities will be critical for University of Tasmania to identify which data stores are most important for our students to access on a self-service basis.  Our goal is to achieve a management system where our data is tiered by its value and not by its size, which CommVault Simpana software will allow us to do."