University of Canberra slashes TCO and storage cost with Commvault and AWS

Key Assets Protected

• Seven Nutanix clusters, using AHV hypervisors and 700-plus virtual machines
• Microsoft SQL Server databases
• Oracle Database and Real Application Clusters
• Student Management System
• Staff payroll system
• Financial management system
• Business Intelligence
• Content management system (university website and portals)
• Identity Management, End User Computing Configuration Manager, Active Directory and domain controllers

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 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 further modernize the university’s infrastructure and drive cost efficiency.

Since 2014, UC had been using 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 made the decision to adopt a scale-out architecture based on Commvault HyperScale Software 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,” said Mason. “After evaluating other hyperconverged solutions, Commvault HyperScale came out on top both in terms of cost and flexibility based on [its] ability to integrate with Nutanix and other infrastructure vendors. We are saving more than A$390,000 TCO over three years.”

A massive reduction in hardware and tape costs

Since UC adopted AWS and Commvault Complete Backup and Recovery, Justin had 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.

“By 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 we need it,” said Mason.

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

“We were blown away by the simplicity and ease of maintenance with Commvault HyperScale. 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 1.2TB per hour to 3TB 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 HyperScale, UC can dynamically add more nodes as needed 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 failed, their data is totally protected.

“Commvault HyperScale solutions offer a complete software stack on the hardware of our choice. We are confident that using Commvault HyperScale with a validated reference design is going to perform well, be highly available and 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 there was an unforeseen event 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 HyperScale, we gained end-to-end support by Commvault, instead of dealing with different vendors. It makes things so much easier when it comes to supporting the platform, and 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 HyperScale deployment and completed that set up in just three days.

“Commvault Professional Services have a reputation of always providing knowledgeable engineers when engaged for assistance, and the deployment of our Commvault HyperScale Software 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.