Brown University consolidates data infrastructure

Brown did its homework to identify the optimal solution for its requirements, working with Cambridge Computer for additional expertise and resources. After consulting Gartner research and looking at solutions from Cohesity, Rubrik and Veeam, the IT team began comprehensive 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 seamlessly with the Microsoft Azure cloud to enable 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.

"An area of big savings for Brown University is found in the absolute ease of upgrades with Cohesity," said Chris Menard, lead storage administrator for 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 enormous 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 the following benefits:

• Greatly 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 percent, and Brown saved upwards of $75,000 per year in network licensing and additional maintenance cost savings.
• Native integration with Microsoft Azure allowed IT to set up secondary offsite copies in Cohesity Cloud Edition, providing many options for how to leverage the copies.