Appalachian State University Cuts Storage Costs by 3.5x Tiering to Wasabi

The public research university replaced their complex hyperscale cloud storage and unlocked both simplicity and powerful new use cases.

Download PDF

We like Wasabi for how straightforward it is. I don't have to keep track of complex tiers and names providers use to keep us from the storage we want.

— Lance Schoychid, Infrastructure Department, Appalachian State University

Overview

Appalachian State University, colloquially known as App State, is a public research university based in Boone, North Carolina and spans two campuses in the Blue Ridge Mountains and Catawba Valley. Wasabi replaced the school’s legacy cloud storage and enabled the IT team to expand their range of services while keeping costs low.

INDUSTRY:
Education

USE CASE:

Backup & recovery
Archiving
Cloud tiering
Cloud migration
Research data

Challenges

The infrastructure department at App State manages data storage for the entire university. Their previous cloud storage provider's complicated interface and technical hurdles made it hard to work efficiently or find the best price for storage.

Battling complexity

A complicated user interface stood in the way of an efficient workflow for the IT team.

Stressed testing

High egress fees added a costly strain to App State’s regular backup testing protocols.

Long-term protection

App State IT needed a reliable cloud storage destination for of-floading infrequently accessed data from local hardware devices.

The colleagues we serve can understand the bottom line: they’ll spend less on storage with Wasabi than if they bought one additional external drive.

— Lance Schoychid, Infrastructure Department, Appalachian State University

Wasabi lets us be more efficient with our fast, expensive, local storage arrays.

— Lance Schoychid, Infrastructure Department, Appalachian State University

We were able to utilize what we saved with Wasabi to purchase a bigger and quicker on-prem recovery appliance.

— Choya Durham, Manager, Infrastructure Department, Appalachian State University

Solution

Solution provider Data Network Solutions (DNS) introduced the App State team to Wasabi as a low-cost alternative to their existing cloud storage. The team quickly adopted Wasabi’s single-tier high-performance storage and leveraged its integration with their existing Commvault solution to make Wasabi their primary off-site storage location. Using Reserved Capacity Storage (RCS), the IT team paid for a year’s worth of storage upfront with enough space to handle long-term research data university-wide.

Predictable pricing – App State eliminated unpredictable monthly storage costs by buying flat-rate storage up front with RCS pricing.
Unbeatable performance – Wasabi makes quick work of the mountain of data streaming in from Appalachian State’s research teams.
Seamless integrations – Wasabi connected easily across the university’s existing technology partners
Single-pane-of glass-management – Wasabi Account Control Manager simplifies provisioning and management across departments.

Results

The App State team dramatically reduced their storage spending by moving to Wasabi, without changing their existing workflow. With the money they saved, they expanded their cloud storage services to new departments and upgraded their existing infrastructure for greater efficiency.

3.5x Reduction in storage costs: The App State IT team reduced cloud storage spending by over 3.5x by eliminating egress costs.
Increased operational efficiencies: The App State team reinvested their savings with Wasabi into new hardware, boosting operational efficiency.
Reduced management burden: With simple, single-tier storage, IT has more time to invest in other areas.

Solving data challenges in education with a new class of cloud object storage

See how Wasabi stacks up in higher education and learn how colleges and universities are doing more with their data.

Learn More