Brown University Saves 50 Percent of CapEx with Cohesity

Challenges

Chris Menard, Lead Storage Administrator, directs a team responsible for infrastructure, storage, backup and recovery, storage services, and disaster recovery. His team was experiencing challenges with the existing legacy solution, and nightly backups were often not completed. With existing infrastructure from Data Domain, Networker and VMware, there were a lot of moving parts to ensure a backup completed. Upgrades were extremely painful and the time and effort required by the team for troubleshooting was becoming tedious and cumbersome.

Brown University manages more than 4PB of data, with expansion at upwards of 20TB per week. The exponential growth of data makes it hard to keep up with storage demands. Faced with the existing Data Domain hardware coming up on a maintenance cycle and due for a refresh, Chris and his team decided to take a holistic look at the environment and put a modern solution in place that was designed to leverage virtualization capabilities and newer platforms.

Brown University mandated the following requirements in a secondary data solution:

• Ability to make secondary copies of data to the cloud
• Protection for disaster recovery, including snapshots in case of accidental loss
• Seamless integration with Microsoft Azure for flexible hybrid solution
• Reduce headaches with backups and upgrades to free up IT staff for other projects

Solution

Brown did its homework to identify the optimal solution for its requirements. After consulting Gartner research and looking at solutions from Cohesity, Rubrik and Veeam, the IT team began a comprehensive proof-of-concept (POC) between Cohesity and Rubrik. A key reason Brown went with Cohesity was overall ease-of-use and management, and the ability to connect seamlessly with Azure for enabling disaster recovery with secondary copies of data in the cloud. The evaluation process also included teams from Brown’s Systems Group, responsible for VMware, Windows and UNIX systems, to test recovery across all systems.

Brown deployed Cohesity C2500 hyperconverged nodes with Cohesity DataPlatform Cloud Edition. The Cohesity solution handles all backup and recovery for central IT systems, including physical and virtual machines. Cohesity’s seamless native integration with Microsoft Azure (CloudArchive) allows the university to create a secondary off-site copy of data into Azure for disaster recovery. The IT team is also taking steps to eventually use Cohesity for running test/dev, as a second-tier NAS, and possibly configuring an NFS mount for database backups.

Cohesity’s native integration with Azure could not be matched, and gave us tremendous flexibility for how to manage our secondary data without maintaining a separate piece of hardware. Cohesity Cloud Edition will provide the ability to recover snapshots seamlessly, fully recover VMs directly into Azure, and give us flexibility for using secondary offsite copies with Azure and Cohesity Cloud Edition. Cohesity has greatly simplified the entire process of managing and consolidating secondary data in a hybrid cloud environment.”

– Chris Menard, Lead Storage Administrator, Brown University