CASE STUDYCity of Santa Barbara Delivers
Valuable Secondary Data Protection
with Cohesity
Introduction
The City of Santa Barbara, California is located just 90 miles northwest of Los
Angeles is the county seat of Santa Barbara County with a population of justover 90,000. Often referred to as the ‘American Riviera’, Santa Barbara is locatedbetween the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Ynez Mountains.
Santa Barbara functions similar to a big city because it manages its own police

INDUSTRY
State and Local Government

and fire departments, city waterfront, and airport, managing an annual operatingbudget of just over $350M with approximately 1600 employees. The IT teamsupports all technology functions and operations for the City, including data
backup and protection.
Challenges
The City had a variety of solutions for secondary data infrastructure in its
datacenter environment, including Dell, Microsoft, Veeam, and VMware. When it
became time for a backup storage refresh, the IT team began to explore modernsolutions available on the market, rather than adding more servers with storage
capacity.
Santa Barbara was experiencing exponential data growth, estimated at 30% peryear. Retention requirements for legal departments and public records with HIPAA
and PCI data required the City to manage data for longer periods of time. The
current legacy environment was running out of capacity and did not make sense
for future scalability. Instead of purchasing additional Dell servers loaded with disks,
the City looked for a next-generation solution to back up its existing environment
and prepare for future growth.
Santa Barbara aimed for the following capabilities in a secondary storage solution:• Superior deduplication and compression capabilities• Move away from independent servers and storage environment• Lower TCO for modern secondary data infrastructure• Cloud integration features for future proof solution

USE CASE
Backup and Recovery, Scale Out
Storage
SOLUTION PARTNERS
Dell, Microsoft, VMware“The City of Santa Barbara
saw immediate results instorage capacity with better
deduplication rates and asimplified, cost-effective
secondary data solution
from Cohesity. We areconfident Cohesity will
enable the City to soon
utilize cloud backup andarchiving, as well as replicate
and snapshot backup dataso that we can continue
to mitigate risk to protect
our overall environment.
Cohesity continues todevelop and add features ata rapid pace, and we lookforward to seeing additional
benefits in the future.”
CAZI BRASGA,
Information Technology Supervisor,
City of Santa Barbara

CASE STUDYCity of Santa Barbara

Solution
After evaluating options and costs, including comparing Cohesity and Rubrik, the IT team chose Cohesity DataPlatform andCohesity C2600 nodes for backup storage. While the IT team wanted a solution with cloud features, they also needed a solution
like Cohesity that could offer a strong on-premises solution as well. As a software agnostic solution, Cohesity DataPlatform canseamlessly integrate with other backup software as a scale-out deduplication target storage, alongside its own backup capabilities.
The City is using Cohesity to back up 150 virtual machines, as well as its SQL database and other files.
Santa Barbara has a data center located away from its main offices at an Emergency Operations Center at the fire station, and will
eventually leverage Cohesity’s built-in integration with public clouds, such as Microsoft Azure, in order to more cost effectively
manage disaster recovery out of the region. The City eventually hopes to use Cohesity’s native cloud back up features to back up
its critical VMs and data to the cloud, and the ability to snapshot and replicate data is critical to mitigate risk.

Results
The Cohesity solution is both flexible and future-proof, toThe overall backup process is greatly simplified, now only

meet the current needs for Santa Barbara and to prepare

requiring the City to copy backups to one repository andfor scale-out expansion and cloud storage with Azure andautomatically replicating to its disaster recovery site, instead

AWS down the road. A huge benefit with Cohesity is itsof the need to manage multiple copy jobs to replicate

deduplication and compression capabilities that has helped

backups to the two locations. The City of Santa Barbara

the City use its storage capacity much more efficiently.

prides itself on being environmentally conscious, and byPreviously, the City had deduplication rates of 3:1, but

reducing the number of servers and storage that required

now with Cohesity has achieved a rate of 10:1, a leap frompower and cooling in the data center through more efficientwhat Windows and Dell achieved previously. With superior

deduplication and compression, the City can boast of a ‘green’

deduplication, the City has flexibility to retain data for longer

solution with Cohesity.

periods of time, as well as the ability to meet storage capacity
needs. The Cohesity solution enables cost savings byproviding greater storage and eliminating the costs associatedwith buying more appliances or building its own servers toaccommodate growth.
The intuitive interface with Cohesity has given the entire
IT team more simplicity to manage the secondary storage
environment. The IT team can go into the dashboard, setup a view, attach a replication job and it is done in a matterof minutes. The backup copy used to take up to 12 hours,
but now is completed in under eight hours and the time

The City of Santa Barbara realized many benefits with Cohesity
including:• Significant improvement in deduplication andcompression rates for backups• Simplified management of secondary storage for greater
efficiency• Time to replicate backups reduced by 50%• Lower TCO with modern, scale-out solution with native
cloud integration

for replication of backups from City Hall to the EmergencyOperations Center was cut in half.

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