UCSB Consolidates Its Data Protection on Cohesity

Challenges

UCSB’s Administrative & Residential IT (ARIT) has a team of 40 professionals that support the entire campus, including departments like police, human resources, facilities, housing, and ensure that the IT infrastructure is performing as expected. Its secondary storage was a combination of multiple point solutions, which made the secondary storage environment complicated and expensive. The UI/setup and maintenance was complex and it was difficult for the staff to stay current on multiple solutions. Maintaining multiple licensing and maintenance agreements negatively impacted the administrative cost. The skyrocketing cost for additional backup capacity limited the team’s ability to expand backup protection to many critical systems.

Another challenge for the university’s IT team was to protect its growing data that was resulting from UCSB’s police body and car dash cameras. This data was critical and mandatory to protect. To address these pain points, the team started evaluating other available solutions.

The selection criteria included

• Simplified backup solution with data replication in the cloud
• Replication performance to AzureGov and CJIS compliant for use with police car/body cam video capture and storage
• Predictable pricing that did not limit future expansion
• Enterprise level support that UCSB could rely on

Solution

After a three-month, onsite proof of concept (POC) that included Veeam, Rubrik and Cohesity, the ARIT team decided to replace university’s legacy, fragmented solution (Commvault, Tegile and Nimble) with Cohesity, a unified hyperconverged secondary storage platform. Cohesity’s native cloud integration allowed the team to seamlessly replicate and archive its production data offsite to Microsoft Azure or AzureGov for protecting police videos, or Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The IT team provided a single solution for all 13 departments to consolidate their backups on one platform, and scale-out as required. Setup and ongoing management dramatically simplified with Cohesity, and the users could now see their backup and recovery jobs, external sources, monitoring and alerting, all in one place.

In near future the team plans to leverage Cohesity for its test/dev environment, which will help optimize its primary storage capacity.

Cohesity helped us to easily backup the growing critical and mandatory to save data, like police department videos from their vehicle and body cameras, and made those files instantaneously available upon request. From backup to recovery, analytics to monitoring and alerting, Cohesity consolidated everything under a simple, easy-to-access user interface.

—Ben Price, Director, Administrative & Residential IT, UCSB