For decades, Cornell servers relied on EZ-Backup, a service established in 1994 on IBM technology. The service delivered consistent and reliable performance, but as Cornell’s IT landscape evolved, it became clear that the legacy solution no longer aligned with modern needs. After a thorough evaluation, a new server backup direction was chosen: Cohesity, a platform better suited to today’s environment, offering enhanced functionality, efficiency, and improved collaboration across IT teams.

Improved Functionality and Efficiency

"Cohesity changed our Virtual Machine (VM) recovery time from days to minutes," said Dave Shirk, CIT Manager for Storage, Backup, and Servers. His team also proved Cohesity viable for Shared File Services (SFS) backups.

“It took a few years working with Cohesity before we were confident enough in the solution to implement it across the full campus,” said Shirk.

In addition to basic file backups, Cohesity offered more features, like global file indexing and block-based image backups, to further enhance usability and recovery speed.

Brenda Lapp, a Technical Consultant in the Center for Advanced Computing, appreciated the time savings her team realized through that file indexing.

“I recently had a researcher submit a request to restore a file from a specific path and before a particular date, but the researcher forgot they had renamed the folder. Global file indexing allowed me to search their protection group for part of the filename and directed me to the original location. Despite the path change, I was able to complete their request in minutes and one email,” said Lapp.

Strengthened IT Collaboration

The CIT Cloud and Infrastructure Services team, in partnership with the distributed IT units, leaned into a deeper collaboration to design and implement Cornell’s new Server Backup service. The multi-year initiative included migrating backups from IBM Spectrum Protect to Cohesity while building a support model that centralizes core processes but empowers unit-level IT teams to address the diverse use cases they encounter.

The result is a more robust, scalable, and collaborative backup solution that gives more control to the server administrator and reflects Cornell’s commitment to systems that are “as common as possible, as different as necessary.”