Sarbanes-Oxley and other compliance regulations require, for example, that financial transactions be retrievable for years, but don't mandate they be kept on production servers. On the other hand, videos that the sales force uses may not have to be archived for compliance reasons, but they should be backed up and readily available rather than archived offsite.

Once the data is prioritized, Herbalife uses CommVault's to schedule backups and assign storage locations based on the degree to which the data has to be accessible. "Data has exploded and you've got to keep ahead of it," Schissel says, "so that you're not making your users wait but also making the most efficient use of storage."

Although the IT group must deal with a changing mix of structured and unstructured data, Schissel's staff realized that no matter what kind of content it is, the lifecycle is the same: create, categorize, store, archive, retrieve. Thinking of the process that way, the IT group can configure tools to back up all the data, but treat , depending on how accessible Herbalife needs it to be. For example, Herbalife backed up fulfilled product orders that are several months old, archiving that data to storage servers. Sales videos are also backed up regularly, but they are kept on active servers so they're more accessible.

Simpana also allows Herbalife to manage storage by exception, meaning that if hiccups occur during backup, a report automatically goes to the IT group so someone can investigate what went wrong.

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