Storage

Saint Michael's College Implements Storage and Backup Service

• By Leila Meyer
• 02/19/15

In an effort to manage rapid data growth, Saint Michael's College near Burlington, VT has replaced its existing storage infrastructure with a service that combines local storage controllers with cloud storage.

The significant increase in the volume of data was straining the college's network resources, and the cost of scaling its existing storage infrastructure to meet demand proved too expensive. The ever-expanding volume of data was also overwhelming the college's backup system, so it could no longer complete a backup with a 24-hour window.

"It was far too expensive to purchase the hardware we continually had to buy to scale," said Joe Pawlaczyk, associate director of the IT data center at St. Michael's, in a prepared statement. "Plus, as the amount of data we had grew, between two storage area networks, tape and additional disk storage, we couldn't back everything up in 24 hours. And even after we backed everything up, recovering files for our users was complex, time consuming and difficult."

The college's IT team began searching for a cloud-based solution that could provide high performance for end users, and that was easy to manage, intuitive, cost effective and secure, while allowing the college to maintain control of its data.

The team selected the Nasuni Service, which uses the Nasuni Filer appliance to cache the most frequently used data on site and automatically backs up the environment to the cloud as often as every 60 seconds. The college pays only for the storage it uses, and when it needs more space, the IT team can contact the company to increase the capacity within minutes, according to information from Nasuni. To ensure the security of the college's data, all encryption keys are held only by Saint Michael's.

Since implementing the new system, the college's users have noticed no difference in performance, but scalability is no longer an issue, backups complete on time and the IT team can recover any data from word processing documents to multi-terabyte data volumes quickly and easily, according to information from the company.