University of Canberra Saves A$390,000 with Commvault Cloud and AWS: A Data Protection Success

University of Canberra Slashes TCO by A$390,000 with Commvault Cloud and AWS. 

University of Canberra modernizes backup infrastructure with Commvault Cloud and AWS, achieving significant cost savings and improved data protection. 

Saves TCO by a $ 390,000 over three years 

University of Canberra (UC) is one of the top 20 young universities in the world, according to the prestigious Times Higher Education in 2020. It offers a range of courses to more than 22,000 students in Australia, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam and Bhutan. UC’s vision is to focus on research excellence and provide new opportunities for students via practical courses and an emphasis on entrepreneurship. With almost 30% growth in research data over the last 12 months, Justin Mason, Associate Director for Vendor and Operations at UC, saw the need to modernize the university’s infrastructure further and drive cost efficiency.  

Since 2014, UC has used Commvault backup software with Amazon S3 and Glacier to store disaster recovery copies and support long-term data retention. The university was already reaping the benefits of efficiency and cost savings via this cloud strategy. When it reached the point that an upgrade was needed for the backup infrastructure, Justin decided to adopt a scale-out architecture based on HyperScale X instead of using a traditional scale-up architecture with multiple media agents and storage infrastructure.  

“We are running 90% of our workloads on Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure,” Mason said. “After evaluating other hyperconverged solutions, HyperScale X came out on top regarding cost and flexibility based on their ability to integrate with Nutanix and other infrastructure vendors. We are saving more than A$390,000 TCO over three years.”  

Using AWS with Commvault as part of our cloud strategy saved A$149,000 in hardware and tape costs over six years and ensured our data is readily available whenever we need it.”  

Justin Mason, Associate Director, Vendor and Operations University of Canberra 

A massive reduction in hardware and tape costs 

Since UC adopted AWS and Commvault Autonomous Recovery, Justin has seen a decrease in support resource requirements. This enabled the IT team to focus on more strategic tasks, such as improving the student journey and providing better services to university staff members.  

“Using AWS with Commvault as part of our cloud strategy, we saved A$149,000 in hardware and tape costs over six years and ensured our data is readily available whenever needed,” said Mason.  

With the migration to Commvault Cloud, UC has achieved a true, highly available backup environment with less backup infrastructure to manage without losing functionality.  

“We were blown away by the simplicity and ease of maintenance with Commvault Cloud. Now, one staff member can monitor backups for 400 servers and 200 databases and still have time to do other important work,” said Mason. “It also improved the average throughput of backups from 1.2 TB per hour to 3 TB per hour, a 150% increase in performance.” 

Gaining end-to-end support with Commvault

In the past, the on-premises storage layer from Commvault was good but required extra resources to manage. By upgrading to Commvault Cloud, UC can dynamically add more nodes for additional compute and storage capacity and save on the initial outlay. The built-in redundancy also gives peace of mind to the university that if a node fails, its data is protected.  

“Commvault Cloud solutions offer a complete software stack on the hardware of our choice. We are confident that using HyperScale X with a validated reference design will perform well, be highly available, and be easy to expand,” said Mason. “We also have off-site backups stored in another data center just a few hundred kilometers away with AWS cloud. If an unforeseen event occurred at the university, we would know that our critical data is safe and secure.”  

UC no longer needs to support different storage stacks with different storage vendors or worry about whether the Commvault layer and the storage layer have any underlying issues between them. “With Commvault Cloud, we gained end-to-end support by Commvault instead of dealing with different vendors. It makes things so much easier when supporting the platform, and we have seen a decrease in support requests logged regarding software or hardware issues,” said Mason.  

UC also engaged Commvault Professional Services to install and configure the Commvault Cloud deployment and completed that setup in three days.  

“Commvault Professional Services have a reputation of always providing knowledgeable engineers when engaged for assistance, and our Commvault Cloud deployment was no exception. I would have no hesitation in recommending Commvault. Its product, support, and services made one of our most vital systems easy to support and maintain,” said Mason.  

Commvault Cloud solutions offer a complete software stack on the hardware of our choice. We are confident that using HyperScale X with a validated reference design is going to perform well, be highly available and easy to expand.“  

Justin Mason, Associate Director, Vendor and Operations University of Canberra