Case Study: Ivy League University achieves cloud-first backup and nearly 80% data reduction with NetApp AltaVault

Ivy League University Puts Cloud First with AltaVault

An Ivy League university pursuing a Cloud First strategy needed to consolidate eight data centers into one and cut IT costs, but its legacy backup environment—250 physical servers writing more than 3.5 PB of uncategorized data to tape—was slow, complex and risky (a 35 TB restore once took 10 days). The school wanted a practical way to begin using public cloud storage while improving restore times and reducing footprint and management overhead.

The university deployed NetApp AltaVault with Veritas NetBackup and Amazon S3, installed quickly with NetApp Professional Services. AltaVault caches two weeks of backups locally, encrypts data in transit and at rest, and uses inline deduplication to cut S3 storage by about 80% (4.52:1), enabling the school to retire tape, shrink its on‑site footprint to one rack, speed restores, and recover directly from the cloud. The solution will be expanded campus‑wide and integrated with SnapMirror/SnapVault to further consolidate and migrate noncritical data to the cloud.

Ivy League University