Case Study: AutoNation achieves 60% per-terabyte cost savings and modern backup and disaster recovery with Cohesity

AutoNation Consolidates their Secondary Storage and Improves Operational Efficiency with Cohesity

AutoNation, the largest automotive retailer in the U.S. with more than 360 retail operations and over 25,000 employees, faced growing IT strain across a primary datacenter and DR site supporting 1,300+ VMs, 200 physical servers and 1.2 PB of data. Legacy backup systems caused up to 6,000 monthly failures, required a dedicated staff member at 70% time to manage, didn’t protect all applications, and could not scale without costly forklift upgrades—while increased AWS development created a need for a hybrid, cloud-integrated protection strategy.

After a proof-of-concept, AutoNation deployed Cohesity C2510 nodes as a single, scale-out secondary data platform to consolidate backups, target storage and SQL protection with a unified UI and native AWS integration. The change cut job failures by 20x, halved backup windows, lowered TCO (about 60% per TB versus traditional SAN and 50% lower annual maintenance), freed Tier‑1 storage, and enabled a hybrid DR plan (75% on-prem, 25% in AWS) with long-term retention to Glacier and the ability to spin up VMs in AWS from backups.

AutoNation

Adam Rasner

Head of IT and Operations