Case Study: St. Johns River Water Management District achieves 29% cost savings and minutes‑level recovery with Dell EMC CloudArray

St. Johns River Water Management District - Customer Case Study

St. Johns River Water Management District, one of Florida’s five water management districts, faced unmanageable tape-based backups for more than 80 TB of data, spending about $150,000 a year and tying up roughly 30% of a system administrator’s time. Needing multi-site file access across service centers and field stations with faster recovery and lower upfront cost, the District evaluated cloud options and chose a software-based solution from Dell EMC—TwinStrata CloudArray integrated with Google Cloud Storage.

Dell EMC implemented CloudArray to provide multi-site CIFS/NFS access with offsite replication to Google Cloud Storage, eliminating much of the tape process and hardware appliance costs. The deployment cut backup recovery from over 30 hours to minutes, reduced management time and cost, and delivered about 29% savings versus the prior tape environment, while enabling instant reconnection and geo-replicated snapshots for improved protection.

St. Johns River Water Management District

Kevin Brown

Chief of the District’s Bureau of Information Technology Services