Berkeley College Decreases Cost and Migrates to Microsoft Azure with Rubrik

Near-zero

RTOs (days to secs)

33%

TCO savings

Azure

Seamless cloud archival

Overview

A leader in providing career-focused education since 1931, Berkeley College is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and enrolls more than 8,000 students – including more than 550 international students – in its Master’s, Bachelor’s, and Associate’s degree and Certificate programs. Students can study in more than 20 career fields. Berkeley College is comprised of the Larry L. Luing School of Business®, the School of Professional Studies, the School of Health Studies, and the School of Liberal Arts. The School of Graduate Studies offers an MBA in Management online and in Woodland Park, NJ.

Berkeley College has five New Jersey campuses – Dover, Newark, Paramus, Woodbridge and Woodland Park. In New York, there are three campuses – Midtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, and White Plains. Berkeley College Online® serves a global population. For four consecutive years, U.S. News & World Report has named Berkeley College among the Best Colleges for Online Bachelor’s Programs and among the Best Online Bachelor’s Programs for Veterans. The website address is www.BerkeleyCollege.edu.

Leonard De Botton, CIO at Berkeley College, leads a team that supports the college’s nine campuses. “As a CIO, I am always looking for products that will streamline our business and deliver speed to provide the best customer experience. With Rubrik’s platform, we can meet these objectives while freeing up our time to use the solution for use cases beyond backup. We have the flexibility to spin up applications on Rubrik in a matter of minutes,” said De Botton.

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Berkeley College realized 33% TCO savings, achieved a near-zero RTO, and archived data to Microsoft Azure for instant application availability with Rubrik. Watch to hear Berkeley College's story with Rubrik.

As a CIO, I am always looking for products that will streamline our business and deliver speed to provide the best customer experience. With Rubrik’s platform, we can meet these objectives while freeing up our time to use the solution for use cases beyond backup.

Leonard De Botton
CIO

Challenges

Complex legacy backup software, instability, and administratively difficult to manage software
Complex replication and cumbersome long-term archive process
Lengthy recovery times

Results

Near-zero RTO (from days to seconds)
33% TCO savings
Setup of data archival to Microsoft Azure for long-term retention and instant access

The Solution

One platform for backup, disaster recovery, replication, cloud archival, and test/dev
Elimination of tape with data archival to Microsoft Azure
Rubrik for Physical SQL for point-in-time backup and restores
Integration with Pure Storage FlashArray//m for high performance

Challenges

Legacy approach not built for the cloud era

As the team experienced high data growth, data management became increasingly important for a highly virtualized and cloud-based environment. Joseph Pagano, Director of Infrastructure at Berkeley College, said that the previous solution was unable to meet the needs of their growing infrastructure. “Backup administration was complex considering the growth we had experienced from virtualization. Our legacy backup application was administratively difficult to manage, and it was becoming an increasing issue that we could not grow with our old backup technology, said Pagano. “Additionally, our previous solution was not in line with the virtualized world. We were protecting our data with old age backup when we had new age virtualized servers.”

Pagano and team began looking for a more stable and efficient solution that was built for modern IT. “We wanted a solution that could backup in the time frame that we needed. We wanted to backup all of our servers multiple times a day and have it on nonproduction storage, but traditional systems could not do that. We chose Rubrik because it was purpose-built for the new world,” said Pagano.

Our legacy backup application was administratively difficult to manage, and it was becoming an increasing issue that we could not grow with our old backup technology.

Joseph Pagano
Director of Infrastructure

Solutions

Deploying Rubrik for use cases beyond backup

Berkeley College brought Rubrik in their main and colocation production data center and deployed Rubrik for its full suite of use cases for its virtualized and physical environment, including backup, disaster recovery, replication, cloud archival, and test/dev.

Total hard savings before and after Rubrik

With Rubrik, Berkeley College is seeing a 33% reduction in TCO. “With Rubrik, we had immediate cost savings from increasing storage effciency, consolidating tape, servers, and hardware into one platform, and freeing up time for our employees.”

With Rubrik, we had immediate cost savings from increasing storage efficiency, consolidating tape, servers, and hardware into one platform, and freeing up time for our employees.

Leonard De Botton
CIO

Featured: Azure Stack

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Key Use Cases

Instant recovery from failures, disasters, or Ransomware

"Restoring is now so simple and fast. We simply right click on the system and within seconds, it’s done. In the past, this would have been a night of work if not two days. Additionally, in the case of a Ransomware attack, you can restore the data in a matter of minutes with Rubrik."

Replication for DR

"Replication with our previous solution was cumbersome and complex. We had to manually configure it and write scripts to replicate from one of our locations to another. Rubrik is device-based replication, and after we set it up, it is all policy-driven. Now, we can use Rubrik to instantly recover in case of a disaster."

Data archival to Microsoft Azure

"With Rubrik, we could eliminate tape, integrate seamlessly with Azure, and securely mobilize our applications from on-premises to the cloud. Together, Rubrik and Azure helps us decrease costs, stay within our data retention policy, and establish a stronger DR strategy."

High performance with Pure Storage and Rubrik

"The combination of Pure’s all-flash array with Rubrik has given us unparalleled performance. Now, we have two next-gen applications working together seamlessly thanks to Rubrik."

Test/dev workflows

"Rubrik gives us a lot of tools that we can leverage for our company’s workflow processes. For instance, if someone wants to upgrade an application, we can simply mount a copy from Rubrik, test on it, and shut it down."

Rubrik for physical SQL

"Point-in-time backup and restore for Microsoft SQL is a differentiator for Rubrik. Usually, those traditional backups and restores were time and resource intensive. Rubrik has changed the game and made it very simple and stable. We set a policy, and it just works."

Data orchestration to increase cost-effectiveness:

"Rubrik frees ups our production SAN from doing all the snapshots. Rubrik has baked in policies that manages the data and sends it the lowest cost storage tier."