Metropolitan State College Denver Implements CommVault Simpana

Metropolitan State
College of Denver,
a college with 55 major fields and 90 minors offered in a
diverse urban setting, has implemented CommVault Simpana
9 software to streamline and improve the management and protection of
academic data while ensuring increased service levels for students and faculty.

As part of
the college’s use of technology in support of educational excellence, Metro State
digitized academic files and data for ‘green’ and reliable retention
of up to 90 days. Over time, however, it became difficult to determine what and
where data was stored. The college also struggled to keep pace with rapid data
growth, which wreaked havoc on backup and recovery windows.

After giving its legacy EMC NetWorker data protection software a failing grade
for unreliable and complex backup and recovery, Metro State
evaluated solutions that could reduce redundant data, give IT more control over
data sprawl, minimize risk and optimize storage utilization.

Metro State chose CommVault’s data protection approach to consolidate
backup and recovery, deduplication and file archive functions by taking
advantage of Simpana software’s unified platform and single pane-of-glass
management in an effort to cut redundant data in half, meet backup and recovery
windows and achieve an approximately 75 percent increase in backup operation
efficiencies.

Thanks to
Simpana software’s file archiving capabilities, the college can better control
growing file shares that contain aged and inactive data. Thus, Metro State has
retired or repurposed older hardware and moved less-critical data off expensive
primary storage onto secondary tiers for longer-retention of more than 90 days,
which exceed its current retention SLA and help deliver significant storage
cost savings. Additionally, the college can now offer its more than 24,000
students and faculty additional services, such as data repositories for
temporary project files.

According to
Metro State, CommVault’s platform approach and embedded deduplication
delivered more functionality when compared to disk-based hardware appliances,
such as EMC’s Avamar Data Store, which had a reported 40-percent higher TCO
over a five-year period.

CommVault’s
Professional Services ensured a rapid deployment; backups encompassing 20 TBs
of data ran within two weeks of implementation and all backup
windows are now met reliably and efficiently.

By
eliminating tape altogether, Metro
State projects an annual
cost savings of $17,000 in tape pickup services and has reallocated that budget
and additional administration to expanding its disaster recovery plan at little
to no incremental cost.

Metro State
College is now evaluating CommVault’s edge data protection solution to
safeguard data residing on laptops and desktops used by the office of the
president and other top college officials.

Kenneth
Garcia, director of IT infrastructure services at Metro State College said: "With Simpana software, we can really use one
product to unify data management across Metro State’s
server, laptop and desktop data. By consolidating our data protection on
CommVault’s single platform, we’ve recaptured hardware costs, improved SLAs,
extended data retention and improved backup and recovery."

Garcia continues: "Simpana software was the only product that
gave us everything we wanted in one platform. We also solicited a lot of
feedback and heard over and over how Simpana software was ‘bulletproof,’ and
that feedback meant a lot."

Garcia concluded: "Augmenting Metro State’s
capabilities with CommVault’s Professional Services was a smart decision as I
didn’t lose a wink of sleep during the deployment. We had great knowledge
transfer and CommVault’s input on how to maintain our environment was icing on
the cake."