Protecting education and research with improved cybersecurity

Overview

Challenge

• To protect education and research data cost efficiently, FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland needed to expand its backup infrastructure.

Solution

• The team of Sonio AG, Veeam and Hitachi Vantara deployed a block and object storage solution for FHNW to improve business continuity and enforce backup best practices.

Outcome

• FHNW achieved 3x to 4x acceleration of tape backups, increased cloud data backup-to-disk retention from 1 month to 5 years and reduced cyber risks with immutable backups. The new, efficient primary backup storage has reduced electricity consumption by 40%.

Challenge

FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland offers a broad range of 57 bachelor’s and master’s degree programs across 10 separate departments and schools. A highly attractive destination for around 14,000 students, researchers and approximately 3,200 staff members, the university focuses on interdisciplinary education and applied research around the future of work, a zero-emission society, and the future of healthcare. FHNW wants to inspire the next generation of skilled knowledge workers and leaders in the four Swiss cantons of Aargau, Basel-Landschaft, Basel-Stadt and Solothurn.

Patrick Gebhard, System Engineer at FHNW, adds: “For an educational institution like us, data is at the very core of what we do. Facilitating innovation is key to FHNW’s mission. To attract students, researchers and staff, we need to provide top-notch services – that includes facilities, learning concepts, business partnerships, and also communication services. Safeguarding learning and research data is essential to ensure high satisfaction and drive future-focused, cutting-edge research in different fields, with varying needs and service requirements.”

In a challenging economic climate, FHNW faces increasing cost pressures across all departments and services. At the same time, new cybersecurity challenges are emerging as IT systems and cloud deployments become ever more complex.

To continue delivering high-quality, reliable services to students and staff, FHNW wanted to optimize data management and boost business continuity while maximizing cost-efficiency and value for money.

Solution

As a publicly owned university, FHNW launched an open tender to modernize and expand its backup infrastructure. After evaluating various offers, it selected the leading Swiss IT services provider Sonio AG to deploy a comprehensive Hitachi Vantara storage solution. “We run a heterogeneous environment with different hypervisors including Proxmox Virtual Environment and VMware vSphere. And we wanted to ensure native support for immutable backups, which led to a range of demanding technical requirements,” confirms Patrick Gebhard. “We were impressed by the quality, thoughtfulness, the well-reasoned sizing and of course the competitive price of Sonio’s proposal. With local support from Sonio and proven Hitachi Vantara solutions, it easily beat the other options.”

Together with Sonio experts and Hitachi Vantara technicians, FHNW implemented two Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G350 arrays as primary backup repositories for Veeam Data Platform. The team also installed Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery in combination with the highly cost-efficient and future-proof S3-compatible object storage management solution, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP).

“The smart Sonio solution architecture with HCP as an immutable backup layer was a great, cost-efficient fit for our data protection needs,” adds Patrick Gebhard. “Our ongoing collaboration with Sonio and Hitachi is very smooth and professional. It’s impressive to see how the Japanese heritage and values translate into highly competent and quick delivery underpinned by real, personal commitment. It has created a very trusted relationship between our organizations.”

Sasa Gržinić, Head of Marketing & Partner Management at Sonio AG, says: “With our extensive expertise in cloud and data solutions, we understood exactly what FHNW needed. The HCP provides the university with new object storage capabilities to optimize and standardize operations, helping the IT team adapt to changing requirements and innovate.”

Outcome

By moving to Hitachi Vantara backup storage, FHNW has increased data protection and gained wholly new capabilities in the data center.

Today, the institution relies on Hitachi Vantara to back up over 1,100 virtual machines running across 45 physical servers with approximately 350 TB of data. Furthermore, FHNW also protects over 150 TB of vital cloud data from its 30,000 Microsoft 365 users.

“Hitachi Content Platform is a fast, flexible and easily extensible solution,” explains Patrick Gebhard. “We quickly started using it for more workloads than initially planned, it’s a very stable and cost-efficient platform that we might in the future also use for production workloads beyond data backups.”

Storing Microsoft 365 cloud data on HCP has allowed FHNW to reduce the load on a more expensive primary storage system and increase data retention from just one month to five years. This has given the team much more flexibility to handle support requests from students and staff.

“Faster access to deleted data makes a real difference for our users and improves the customer service,” explains Patrick Gebhard. “In the past, due to cost and capacity limitations, when we wanted to restore older data, we had to find the right tape. The whole process could take days. Now we can recover anything within minutes during an interactive session with our users. The process is very quick and smooth, boosting service quality and user satisfaction.”

FHNW has seen tremendous performance improvements across its backup processes. Saving offline copies to LTO7 tapes is now 3x to 4x times faster. This helps FHNW to further increase data resilience and reduce business risk. “We were surprised to see how much faster our tape backups are now with HCP,” says Patrick Gebhard. “We have also been able to streamline operations and save costs, as we can manage our tape backups now with 40% fewer drives.”

The storage update has also improved sustainability in the data center, an important aspect for FHNW. The new, efficient primary backup storage has reduced electricity consumption by 40%.

Patrick Gebhard concludes: “With the cost-efficient Hitachi Vantara storage solution designed by partner Sonio, we can now finally follow backup best practices like the 3-2-1 rule, by having another data copy on a different medium at a third location. All in all, we benefit from faster backup performance and improved resiliency against cyberthreats and other security risks.”