“Wasabi is a strong offering from a technical perspective and very appealing in terms of our budget purchasing processes. It took all of 5 minutes to get it integrated with Rubrik. I can’t ask for anything better than that.”

— Dennis Sage, Director of Infrastructure and Network Services

Overview

Founded in 1967, Moraine Valley Community College is located in Palos Hills, Illinois and is the second largest community college in the state, home to 26,400 enrolled students. Moraine Valley hosts their data across hundreds of virtual servers, Windows & Linux servers, and Oracle databases.

Challenge

Moraine Valley was using Veritas to manage their tape backups which were collected weekly and stored in an Iron Mountain facility. This was very time consuming and required a high degree of maintenance from the small IT staff. Once the faculty transitioned to remote work, it became even more difficult to physically coordinate with Iron Mountain every week. The IT department knew it was time to transition their storage away from tape.

Solution

Moraine Valley adopted Rubrik as the school’s new data management software. Director of Infrastructure and Network Services Dennis Sage said that he chose Rubrik because it was best at handling the diversity of the school’s data, and for its ease of implementation. Rubrik also offered S3 compatible archiving as a method to replace tape. Moraine Valley was impressed with Wasabi’s cost effectiveness and high speeds as well as its intuitive integration with Rubrik. The school inked a 1 year, 100 TB Reserved Capacity Storage deal to provide Moraine Valley with high-performance cloud storage. The ability to purchase their storage as a single payment was important. Predictability is key in the public education sector which made Wasabi a good fit for Moraine Valley’s budget. “Wasabi is a strong offering from a technical perspective and very appealing in terms of our budget purchasing processes,” Sage said.

With their new storage system in place, the Moraine Valley IT department have replaced their weekly physical tape backups with regular snapshots and backups to Wasabi, creating a more robust archive.

Results

Sage said the time investment involved in their tape strategy was unsustainable. Their old tape backups were labor intensive and involved physically offloading tapes to an Iron Mountain delivery vehicle every week, a process made harder following the shift to remote work. By contrast, Sage and team found the Rubrik and Wasabi solution to be simple to set up and maintain. Rubrik made creating a backup schedule easy, and Sage noted that these backups require relatively minimal maintenance beyond a cursory check-up, all of which can be done remotely through Rubrik’s intuitive interface. Integration of Wasabi with Rubrik was simple and fast to set up. “It took all of 5 minutes to get it integrated with Rubrik. I can’t ask for anything better than that,” Sage said. He and his small team used to spend six or more hours per week monitoring and transferring their backups, a process which now only takes a matter of minutes. The additional bandwidth has allowed the team to take on proactive projects, like expanding wireless access to students who may not have it at home.

The switch to the cloud has also yielded an improved RTO. Restoring data from a tape backup can take hours, disrupting business continuity. Wasabi backups can be accessed in minutes. In the event of a disaster, Moraine Valley faculty will see minimal disruption due to Wasabi and Rubrik’s high speeds.