Brown University Opts for Cohesity

Cohesity, Inc., in hyperconverged secondary storage, announced that Brown University, the seventh-oldest college in the US, uses its products to consolidate data infrastructure to reduce costs and simplify management.

Brown University was experiencing challenges with its legacy solution that meant nightly backups were not complete the next morning. Its existing infrastructure from EMC Data Domain, EMC NetWorker and VMware involved a lot of moving parts to ensure a backup completed. Upgrades were painful and the time and effort required by the team for troubleshooting was becoming tedious and cumbersome.

Brown did its homework to identify the optimal solution for its requirements, working with Cambridge Computer Services, Inc. for additional expertise and resources. After consulting Gartner research and looking at solutions from Cohesity, Rubrik, Inc. and Veeam Software, Inc., the IT team began proof-of-concept (POC) tests to choose between Cohesity and Rubrik. A key reason Brown went with Cohesity was overall ease-of-use and management, and the ability to connect with the Azure cloud to enable DR 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.

“An area of big savings for Brown University is found in the absolute ease of upgrades with Cohesity,” said Chris Menard, lead storage administrator, Brown University. “Where we used to set aside two days and people from various teams to perform upgrades in our previous environment, we now click a few buttons and go about our business.“

Brown realized time savings across several IT teams. In the old environment, backups would be running almost around the clock. Now instead of troubleshooting and working to re-architect proxy servers to make backups work, the backups were completed well within the SLA windows. In addition, Brown’s VMware team no longer had to clean up snapshots and saved up to 10 hours per week once Cohesity was deployed.

Using Cohesity, Brown University accomplished following benefits: 

• Reduced time of backups and eliminated backup failures and orphaned snapshots. Time savings for upgrades equaled an entire work day for a network administrator.
• Reduced capital expenditure costs by nearly 50%, and Brown saved upwards of $75,000 per year in network licensing and additional maintenance cost savings.
• Native integration with Azure allowed IT to set up secondary offsite copies in Cohesity Cloud Edition, providing many options for how to leverage the copies.

Case study: Brown University Embraces Hybrid Cloud Environment With Cohesity