Parallo Deploys Cohesity HCI at Australian Catholic University

Cohesity, Inc. announced that its Australian partner, Parallo, has won a 2019 CRN Impact Award for the deployment of hyperconverged backup and storage infrastructure at Australian Catholic University (ACU).

The award celebrates supplier-led Australian IT projects and technology innovators that make a difference for customer organisations. Parallo received the Modernising Infrastructure category award in recognition of its work in taking the ACU’s IT infrastructure to a modern platform supporting its goals for innovation, cost savings, efficiencies, and growth.

The ACU was facing performance and capacity issues with its legacy backup and file services products. Further, the legacy infrastructure products were ageing, complex, and unsuited to next-gen architectures, including cloud. The infrastructure transformation project undertaken by Parallo aimed to reduce complexity, risk, and cost while remediating all legacy backup and file services offerings. Parallo deployed a next-gen platform from Cohesity that simplified the environment, enabled a cloud and DR strategy, and reduced TCO.

Cohesity’s HCI helps organizations solve mass data fragmentation by consolidating all secondary workloads, including backups, archival, test-dev, file services, and object stores on a single web-scale platform that spans on-premises and cloud environments, managed via a simple, policy-driven user interface. Parallo architected and enabled migration of all backup and file services functions from five legacy management interfaces to the Cohesity DataPlatform, reducing complexity, risk, and cost, while enabling ACU to give life to its cloud strategy.

The new Cohesity solution TCO was less than the maintenance renewal cost of the five incumbent solutions. Further, Cohesity’s deduplication technology removed redundancies and duplicates from data sets, putting in place an effective copy data management strategy. The lack of proprietary hardware associated with legacy systems changed the economics of the architecture.

Cohesity has also enabled ACU to save on data centre footprint costs, as well as costs associated with power consumption, storage, licensing, and management. In addition, it improved ACU’s RTO, since all backups are readily available on disks and not tapes, while it can also offload snapshots from its primary storage onto Cohesity, which freed up nearly 20%  of capacity, postponing the need to invest in more capacity for primary storage.

“We have achieved a host of benefits by modernizing our infrastructure,” said Niranjan Prabhu, CIO, Australian Catholic University. “We were able to remove risks from aged and numerous platforms as well as lower our overall costs and reduce complexity. We have also enhanced the user experience both operationally and with stakeholders utilizing file services and recover capabilities. With these changes, we now have deployed a modern and flexible platform that’s empowering the organization to manage our data in a much more effective manner, regardless of the location.“

“This award is recognition of Parallo’s tremendous skills and experience in providing a solution which would result in an immediate ROI and positively impact stakeholders across ACU’s applications, infrastructure, architecture, and end user compute teams,” said Theo Hourmouzis, ANZ MD, Cohesity.

“Successful transformation at ACU required both intimate knowledge of the environment and a strong understanding of how disruptive new technologies like Cohesity could enable differentiated outcomes,” he added. “Parallo, with its broad expertise ranging from private cloud and data protection to managed services and Azure services, was key to the successful delivery and implementation of the project. We’re thrilled to work with Parallo as a next-generation systems integrator which is well placed to make its clients achieve success in a hybrid cloud world.“

“I’m proud of what we’ve delivered and excited about the additional value ACU will receive from the platform over time,” said Shaun Webber, co-founder and regional director, Parallo. “Cohesity’s future roadmap at ACU includes backup of Microsoft Office365 and Microsoft OneDrive enabling ACU to confidently proceed with its cloud journey.“