Case Study: Metro State College achieves reliable, deduplicated backups and faster recovery with Commvault Simpana software

Simpana Software Tops the Honor Roll at Metro State College for Ensuring Advanced Protection & Retention of Academic Data

Metropolitan State College of Denver, a large urban public institution serving roughly 24,000 students, was struggling to protect and retain rapidly growing digital academic and administrative data. With 80% of its servers virtualized and backups ballooning to 20 TB, the legacy EMC Networker platform produced frequent failures, unreliable restores, poor indexing, limited Solaris support and an inability to meet daily backup windows or meet 90‑day retention goals—creating heavy administrative overhead and “Compulsive Backup Disorder” for the IT team.

The college deployed CommVault Simpana software (Backup & Recovery, Deduplication and Archive) with CommVault Professional Services, choosing a hardware‑agnostic, capacity‑licensed software approach. Deduplication reduced data moved across the backup network by about 50%, bringing backups that once took days into a 24‑hour window, eliminating tape (saving ~$17,000/year and 15 staff hours/week), and improving SLAs, operational efficiency (≈75% improvement) and retention to 90–120 days. Centralized management, cost savings and freed resources also enabled Metro State to reallocate funds toward disaster recovery planning and future archive and endpoint protection projects.

Metro-state-college

Kenneth Garcia

Director of IT Infrastructure Services at Metro State College