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Cloud Strategy Transforms Efficiency and Reduces Storage Footprint

Cloud Strategy Transforms Efficiency and Reduces Storage Footprint

Illinois State University leverages Commvault and AWS to increase agility, resiliency, and scale.

Reduced storage and backup hardware footprint

Greater agility to adopt and utilize cloud

Enabled an “as-a-service” campus IT model

1 petabyte

of data secured

21,000

students

3,800

faculty

Challenge

Reduce complexity and manual processes, including lengthy trips to an offsite data center
Simplify protection and accelerate recoverability for data across on-premises and cloud environments
Protect irreplaceable data campus-wide against loss, malware, and ransomware
Empower campus IT departments to handle routine activities on their own

Solution

Realizes modern, scale-out data protection with optimized performance, automated load-balancing, and scalability with Commvault Cloud HyperScale™ X
Continues to trust Commvault Complete™ Autonomous Recovery for its reliability and ease of use, and simplified, recovery across on-premises and cloud data
Empowers departments with the ability to do self-service backup and restore operations for faster data recovery and less administrative overhead
Ensured operations ran smoothly while the university was experiencing staffing challenges with Commvault Enterprise Support that included a dedicated technical account manager

Results

Cut power, cooling, and associated costs for on-prem data centers
Reduced ISU’s storage and backup hardware footprint
Eliminated trips to the offsite data center and manual hardware maintenance, freeing up time for university IT staff to focus on more strategic projects
Enabled an “as-a-service” campus IT model, saving central IT and departments time and increasing satisfaction with distributed IT staff

END OF AN ERA: MIGRATING FROM THE DATA CENTER TO THE CLOUD

For the central IT team at Illinois State University (ISU), it’s an ongoing challenge to keep up with the daily needs of more than 21,000 students and 3,800 faculty and staff while looking ahead to modernize and protect the campus.
They saw migrating to the cloud as a critical next step to save time and money and accelerate delivering new services and capabilities to the university. Managing hardware at a secondary data center a few hours away was costly—both in terms of equipment as well as the time spent by the IT team traveling offsite and performing maintenance tasks.

While a hybrid-cloud migration would ease these concerns and increase ISU’s agility, it would also introduce new user interfaces and processes, require new skillsets to manage, and contribute to management sprawl with new silos of data. And as is the case with all universities, cybersecurity threats remained top of mind. Addressing these concerns was essential for a successful cloud migration.

A HYBRID CLOUD STRATEGY WITH TRUSTED SUPPORT

ISU migrated its off-site backup and disaster recovery to Amazon Web Services (AWS), allowing it to decommission and close the offsite data center. To manage its hybrid cloud data, the team chose Commvault based on its deep integration and extensive support for cloud technologies. They chose Commvault Cloud HyperScale™ X for a modern, scale-out implementation that gave them all the benefits of the Commvault platform with, limitless scale, intelligent automation, and load-balancing.

“We chose Commvault Cloud HyperScale™ X because we’ve been very satisfied and comfortable with the Commvault solution,” said Devin Carlson, Assistant Director, Infrastructure Operations. “We have a lot of confidence and faith in the service.”

With broad support across the AWS services that ISU has adopted, the team operates as if everything is still in data centers—without the need to change its data protection processes or policies.

Commvault’s powerful automation bolsters ISU’s DR plan in the event of a catastrophic event. If needed, they can shift workloads to Amazon EC2 in a matter of minutes.

“HyperScale™ X and the build-out to the cloud give us some great business continuity and DR planning,” said Craig Jackson, Executive Director of Technology Infrastructure & Research Computing. “If something catastrophic happens, if we need to spin up some VMs and do restores, now our backups are in the cloud as opposed to having to move all that data across the wire before making services available.”

Not only can ISU back up its on-premises data to Amazon’s storage services (S3, Glacier, and Deep Glacier Archive), but Commvault also extends protection to cloud instances, Moreover, the team is able to keep the existing management practices and service-level agreements (SLAs) for their on-premises workloads.

To bridge the gap across staffing changes, ISU turns to Commvault Customer Success Professional Services for active monitoring of the backup environment.

“Commvault Professional Services gave us peace of mind that we have continuity and efficiency in our backup environment through staff changes,” Jackson said. “It was a very valuable service when we were in need.”

And when it comes to the critical matter of protecting against malware and ransomware threats, Commvault’s built-in protection gives ISU a full security dashboard, proactive anomaly detection, advanced reporting, and alerting, as well as the ability to manage multiple backup copies, including air-gapped and immutable copies.

REDUCED POWER AND COOLING COSTS

ISU has created a flexible, resilient, and easily extendable infrastructure – preparing them more readily for the unknown.

Moving to the cloud reduced ISU’s administrative overhead, replacing lengthy car rides for hardware maintenance with a few clicks. It also slashed the data center footprint and associated power and cooling costs.

Meanwhile, deduplication reduces ISU’s storage footprint resulting in substantial savings on their Amazon S3 bill.

With Commvault Complete Autonomous Recovery, central IT extends role-based access to departments. They operate on a self-service basis while administrators maintain full control, freeing them to spend more time on strategic projects like the Game Design Program in College of Fine Arts, the varsity eSports program, the new College of Engineering, and using technological advancements to aid in protecting campus research data.

As ISU adopts more AWS services, Commvault’s extensive support will protect them along the way – whether in Amazon EC2 or Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora or Amazon DynamoDB, or containers running in Red Hat OpenShift or other Kubernetes distributions – they can look forward to more automated workload migration from their on-premises location into AWS and automatic discovery and protection of all data.