Cranfield gets Rubrik backup and Nutanix in expostulate to a cloud

Cranfield University has transposed a Veeam and Data Domain backup infrastructure for one comprising Rubrik backup appliances and Microsoft Azure cloud storage.

In doing so, it has cut a on-site hardware footprint from 24U to 4U, slashed apparatus and chartering costs, and reduced information revive times from hours or days to minutes.

The pierce also gives Cranfield assent of mind in disaster recovery by gaining a ability to run all operations from any plcae regulating practical servers regulating in Azure, should a whole site turn unavailable.

The modernise comes alongside one in that a university transposed a existent Pure Storage peep storage arrays with 12 nodes of Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure hardware.

The whole devise is a expostulate towards simplifying Cranfield’s on-site earthy infrastructure in a pierce that encompasses cloud as a site for storage (and discriminate in box of outages).

Cranfield is a heading investigate investiture in science, attention and technology, with 1,600 staff and 4,000 postgraduate students.

Its IT smoke-stack is formed around Microsoft and Linux servers with Microsoft and Oracle-based applications. It is effectively 100% virtualised on VMware, with 400-600 practical machines regulating during any one time.

Its existent backup infrastructure was formed on Veeam backup program and Data Domain hardware, with riposte to a third party-hosted Data Domain box.

That setup had reached finish of life and was display a signs, pronounced conduct of IT infrastructure Edward Poll.

“Data Domain did what it was ostensible to do, though it was time to modernise things and we wanted to revoke costs, government time and complexity, and boost performance,” he said.

“The vital emanate with Data Domain had turn restores. It ingests well, though recuperating was some-more problematic. It would be excellent for one restore, though if we’d had to revive mixed – 50, 100 or 150 – servers, we would have struggled.”

Cranfield’s IT dialect had already started a tour towards cloud by regulating StorSimple appliances – with about 80TB on site and 0.5PB in a Azure cloud – and had detected how cost-effective it can be.

“Azure was a good fit and we started by meditative we could use Veeam and Data Domain instances in a cloud, though it was suggested to us, ‘why not get absolved of a covering of software?’, and we looked during regulating Rubrik appliances,” pronounced Poll.

Rubrik is partial of an rising difficulty of backup appliances that come as nodes that build into clusters in a identical approach to hyper-converged infrastructure.

Rubrik’s program apparatus can come on authorized server hardware from Cisco, HPE or Dell with peep and spinning hoop inside. Capacities for a smallest four-node cluster are in a 64TB-160TB range, depending on a hardware.

Customers can set policies to mention how prolonged information should be defended as a backup and that can be accessed for prolongation use from Rubrik hardware. Rubrik backup information is seen as an NFS record share before being sent to an in-house earthy repository or a cloud.

Cranfield has deployed 8 Rubrik R348S nodes with a sum of about 80TB of storage on site, with peep and SAS spinning hoop tiers of storage inside. Data is ingested, afterwards copied off to a Azure cloud.

The pivotal advantages for Poll’s group are a almost improved revive times, and a ability to potentially revive practical machines in a cloud, permitting staff to work from any plcae in a eventuality of a disaster.

Rubrik’s CloudOn enables fast liberation to concede for business smoothness in a eventuality of a disaster, pronounced Poll. “If a on-prem site is down, we can fast modify a archived VMs into cloud instances, and launch those apps on-demand in Azure,” he added.

“We don’t notice any disproportion in information ingest, though opening on restores is really most better.”

In cost terms, Cranfield had been spending £50,000 a year on off-site hosting. It now spends about £25,000 a year with Microsoft Azure.

Meanwhile, time spent handling backup is down from about half a day a week to 5 mins a day.

In terms of earthy space and apparatus savings, Poll pronounced a university had incited off 42U of storage and backup devices, of that backup servers and Data Domain comprised 24U.

“Overall, it has given us a simpler, faster and some-more arguable backup service,” he said. “It is some-more simply integrated with a dialect that is relocating towards a DevOps model, and when it comes to information recovery, we are down to mins rather than many hours.”

The storage and backup modernise – with a pierce towards hyper-converged infrastructure – forms partial of a wider devise to rationalize IT by creation use of contemporary devices’ formats with a smaller earthy footprint, as good as a cloud.

Poll added: “The university masterplan is to hit down a IT dialect and to no longer have dual vast datacentres on site. Instead, there will be one datacentre, a ‘resiliency room’ for excess of network equipment, and a cloud.”