Victoria University of Wellington – Data Protection | Case Study

Learn how Parallo delivered Commvault Data Platform upgrade for end-to-end backup management.

A large and diverse institution

Victoria University of Wellington is one of New Zealand’s oldest and most prestigious tertiary institutions with a proud tradition of academic excellence, ranking among the world’s best universities across a range of subjects. Since its original foundation, Victoria University has grown into a large network of campuses, research centres, institutes and partnerships worldwide, with 17,000 students and around 2000 staff.

To provide an effective IT environment for all students, faculty and administrative staff, Victoria University must ensure that data is not only accessible via a wide range of devices, but also secure and protected.

Increasing data complexity

With ever increasing data volumes, ensuring correct storage and protection of data was proving problematic. At the same time, the University had begun embarking on a strategy to migrate services to the cloud, adding additional complexity to an already large environment.

Having invested in a Commvault solution a number of years previously, the improved data protection features offered in the Commvault platform, specifically related to cloud services, aligned perfectly with the University’s own strategy and made an upgrade a natural progression for the infrastructure.

In combination with new functionality, the upgrade would also allow the University to improve their storage management, backup and deduplication functions.

Parallo delivers platform upgrade

Once the decision to implement the upgrade had been made, Parallo were engaged to act as the full-service backup management partner. Having built up a wealth of experience through previous implementations as a long term Commvault partner, Parallo were able to provide Professional Services to advise, plan and implement the upgrade in a controlled manner, whilst ensuring no loss or degradation of service throughout the process.

To begin the engagement, a number of workshops were run with the University in order to outline benefits and develop plans on how to integrate the new features into the existing platform. Considerations and impacts were also discussed, and strategies formed in order to best deal with these. Additionally, full migration and test plans were compiled covering the upgrade stages. Such was the confidence built up in these workshops that the University was comfortable enough to allow the upgrade itself to be performed remotely. This was done so over a number of days whilst consistently minimising the impact to operations and maintaining backup success throughout. Any minor issues were clearly communicated back to University staff and resolved in a timely fashion, whilst once again maintaining platform stability.

The relationship has not finished there however, with Parallo now providing on-going management and support of the upgraded platform, bringing specific skill sets that supplement the University’s own IT department personnel. In doing so, Victoria can be confident that the new platform undergoes constant monitoring and continual improvement to maximise their investment.

Backup confidence

The combination of the new Commvault technology and the Parallo managed service has increased ITS efficiencies and increased backup success rates” says Stuart Haselden, ITS Director at Victoria University.

The upgrade has also allowed Victoria University to begin testing backup, long-term archive and migration to the cloud through Microsoft Azure.

“With Parallo’s knowledge of Commvault, they helped us to migrate over to the new backup environment and to run our day-to-day backup service,” said Mr Haselden.

Victoria University now manages a full range of data from EMC file servers to block level data from across virtual images and virtual machines. In most months the University reports over 99% success rate in backup completions.

“Implementing Commvault with Parallo services has been a great move,” said Mr Haselden.

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“The combination of the new Commvault technology and the Parallo managed service has increased ITS efficiencies and increased backup success rates.”

Stu

Stuart Haselden, Victoria University | ITS Director

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