Case Study: Brown University achieves reliable hybrid‑cloud backups, faster recoveries and major cost savings with Cohesity

Brown University Saves 50 Percent of CapEx with Cohesity

Brown University, an Ivy League research university serving over 9,000 students, was managing more than 4 PB of data growing roughly 20 TB per week and struggling with a complex legacy backup stack (Data Domain, Networker, VMware). Nightly backups frequently failed or ran past windows, upgrades were painful, and the operational overhead to troubleshoot and maintain the environment was consuming IT resources as the hardware approached end-of-life.

Following a PoC, Brown deployed Cohesity C2500 nodes with Cohesity DataPlatform Cloud Edition and native Microsoft Azure integration to consolidate backup and recovery and create secondary offsite copies in Azure. The new solution eliminated backup failures and orphaned snapshots, brought backups within SLA windows, saved the VMware team about 10 hours per week, simplified upgrades, achieved roughly 50% CapEx savings and about $75K/year in licensing/maintenance savings, and freed IT staff to focus on other projects.

Brown University

Chris Menard

Lead Storage Administrator