The Weitz Company improves access to data with Commvault

Construction firm reduces costs, complexity and risk by protecting information in the cloud and at remote sites through a single data management solution

---

Safeguard data in harsh conditions

Unpredictable weather conditions; limited connectivity; sparse onsite IT resources: managing and protecting data on construction sites can be tough.

“In our industry, any delay can seriously impact profitability. If people are unable to do their jobs because building plans or tech specs are not available, it’s money down the drain,” says Ryan Sinnwell, Senior IT Manager, Infrastructure, at The Weitz Company.

With Commvault, Sinnwell and his team have taken the complexity and risk out of data management. “We’ve been using Commvault to protect our data centers and remote sites since 2006. It’s never let us down,” he says.

With Commvault, we can protect data from different sources and in different formats via one interface, which reduces the cost and effort of backups.

— Ryan Sinnwell, Senior IT Manager, Infrastructure | The Weitz Company

Weitz has been going strong for 165 years, making it one of the oldest construction companies in the U.S. Recent accomplishments include constructing the country’s largest student housing development in Texas, a four-star convention center Hilton Hotel in Iowa, and a new district courthouse for the State of Florida. As well as dealing with the unique challenges of the construction industry, Weitz’s IT team has to cope with the same issues as any other organization, including increasingly sophisticated applications, infrastructure and data.

“We’re using more cloud-based solutions, for example Salesforce, to store and share business information. With around 100 users relying on Salesforce every day, we can’t risk losing any data,” explains Sinnwell.

With Commvault and partner, Eagle Technologies, Weitz has established a centralized data protection strategy that spans information from edge, to the data center and in the cloud.

Commvault Complete™ Backup & Recovery protects 180 VMware virtual servers across Weitz’ two data centers in Florida and Des Moines, as well as Salesforce, Procore and remote construction sites. Local backups are created remotely, then transferred to a data center. Commvault’s DASH Copy capability minimizes network bandwidth requirements by deduplicating data. The solution’s auto-discovery also means new virtual machines are automatically added to the backup.

“With Commvault, we can protect data from different sources and in different formats via one interface, which reduces the cost and effort of backups,” says Sinnwell. “And when we need to restore data, it’s quick and seamless. For example, restoring a server would have taken days before, but now we can recover a virtual server in just minutes.”

As a company in a regulated industry with operations in many states, Weitz is subject to statutory requirements. To meet compliance and provide an extra layer of protection for the business, Weitz keeps all project-related emails for 20 years. Commvault’s data classification makes it possible for Weitz to keep a secondary copy of 200 million sub 4K files on hand without having to scan every file with each backup. In the event of corruption on the primary copy, Commvault’s granular restore capabilities give Weitz the ability to restore a single tiny file if needed to meet regulatory compliance and maintain the integrity of historical files.

“Commvault reduces business risk, while making us more agile and responsive, which is vital in today’s construction industry,” says Sinnwell.