Case Study: Texas Tech University achieves up to 40% storage cost savings and consolidated backup with Commvault Simpana

Texas Tech University System Datacenter Enrolls Simpana 8 Software With Embedded Deduplication & Archiving To Advance Disaster Recovery

The Texas Tech University System—supporting multiple campuses, 30,000+ students and thousands of faculty and staff—faced explosive storage growth after migrating to SunGard Banner and consolidating services: centralized storage topped 425 TB and legacy, decentralized backup and tape-based retention could no longer scale or meet disaster-recovery needs. The university needed a consolidated, cost-effective solution to reduce backup footprint, reclaim primary storage and improve recovery times.

Texas Tech deployed CommVault Simpana 8 (Backup & Recovery, Deduplication and Archiving modules) across its Dell/EMC infrastructure, using embedded global deduplication and file archiving to tier data. The move cut roughly 230 TB of application data down to about 40 TB (over 80% reduction), lowered backup media and storage costs by up to 40%, preserved deduped data across tiers without re-hydration, enabled 60+ day disk retention and much faster restores, and reclaimed primary storage by redistributing 5 TB of imaging files—while planning to add replication and phase out tape.

Texas Tech University

Dustin Jordan

Assistant Managing Director of Technology Operations & Systems Management (TOSM)