Case Study: UCSB (University of California, Santa Barbara) achieves unified, simplified data protection and 50% OpEx reduction with Cohesity

UCSB Consolidates Their Data Protection on Cohesity, a Simple Scale-out Hyperconverged Secondary Storage Solution

The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) — a large public research campus supporting over 24,000 students and an Administrative & Residential IT (ARIT) team of 40 — faced a fragmented secondary storage environment made up of multiple point solutions. Complex management, rising licensing and capacity costs, and the need to reliably protect growing, mandatory data (notably police vehicle and body‑cam video with CJIS/AzureGov requirements) prompted UCSB to seek a simpler, cloud‑ready backup solution with predictable pricing and enterprise support.

Following a three‑month PoC, UCSB consolidated backups for 13 departments on Cohesity’s hyperconverged secondary storage platform, leveraging native cloud replication to Microsoft Azure, AzureGov and AWS. The unified UI simplified setup and ongoing management, delivered Google‑like search and instant access to critical files, enabled near‑term capacity optimization, and cut OpEx by more than 50%, freeing the IT team to focus on innovation.

UCSB

Ben Price

Director, Administrative & Residential IT