UCSB consolidates its data protection with Cohesity

The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) is a public research university and one of the 10 campuses of the University of California system. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an independent teachers’ college, UCSB joined the University of California system in 1944 and is the third-oldest general-education campus in the system.

UCSB is a comprehensive doctoral university and is organized into five colleges and schools, offering 87 undergraduate degrees and 55 graduate degrees. The university is virtually a mini-city that has over 24,000 full-time students, 1,000 faculty staff and 13 departments.

The university was ranked 37th among “National Universities”, 8th among U.S. public universities and 24th among Best Global Universities by U.S. News & World Report’s 2016 rankings

The Challenge

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 its 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

The Solution

After a three-month, onsite proof of concept (PoC) that included Veeam, Rubrik and Cohesity, the ARIT team decided to replace the 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, 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.

The Results

UCSB leveraged Cohesity to provide all its 13 departments a unified, scale-out data protection solution. With an easy-to-use and manage UI, users could now see backup and recovery jobs, monitoring and alerting, all in one place. Cohesity’s native cloud integration allowed the IT infrastructure team to seamlessly protect its production data offsite in the cloud.

Key Benefits

• UCSB drastically simplified its data backup and recovery process. With Google-like global search a user can run a more granular search and retrieve the file quicker.
• Native cloud integration with Microsoft Azure, AzureGov and AWS ensured that the data was protected and instantly available when needed. The team saw instant capacity optimization with economies of cloud.
• Reduced OpEx by over 50%, resulting from eliminating multiple point solutions and overhead to manage a fragmented environment.
• Team could focus on more critical items and get innovative, rather than spending time going through long and expensive vendor trainings.