Cal Poly Humboldt
Public California University Eliminates Surprise Bills and Shrinks Google Footprint
Cal Poly Humboldt
Cade Webb
Deputy CIO, Cal Poly Humboldt
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California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt (Cal Poly Humboldt), a public university, used Veeam Backup and Replication with Wasabi Cloud Storage for off-site backups. They thought they knew what Wasabi would cost, but surprise bills kept showing up. They were being charged for storage for deleted data. At the same time, they faced an additional squeeze on their budget when Google ended its free storage for education tier.
Cal Poly Humboldt migrated from Wasabi to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. A proof of concept with 40TB of file server data went so smoothly that they immediately added another 110TB for virtual machine (VM) storage, followed by an additional 100TB to back up their research arm to avoid Google fees following the closure of Google’s free education tier. Today, Veeam moves long-term archives and weekly backups from Cal Poly Humboldt’s servers to their Backblaze B2 Bucket automatically.
Now Cal Poly Humboldt knows exactly what their storage costs will be up front. The university’s front office no longer has to juggle mystery bills with minimum retention fees. Backups happen seamlessly, without requiring an additional learning curve or complex procurement negotiations. The process has been so smooth that Cal Poly Humboldt is planning to scale their storage to over a petabyte to back up and safeguard research data.
Cal Poly Humboldt is a rapidly growing public polytechnic university located in Arcata, California. The university is actively adding in-demand academic programs, building new facilities, and has plans to double enrollment in the coming years.
Cal Poly Humboldt’s Central IT team manages data from all over campus with an iSCSI storage fabric. They’re also cleaning up their Google storage footprint by moving research data from Google to a petabyte-sized research storage server. In addition to a select few HPE file servers running Windows and Linux, they mostly rely on virtual servers through VMware. Data (including about 75TB of VM storage data and 100TB of file-based data) is first moved onto Windows file servers as on-premises storage. From these servers, they use Veeam Backup and Replication to move long-term archives over 90 days old to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, along with the most recent backups.
The Cal Poly Humboldt Information Technology Services team supports departments and functions all across campus, including administration, academics, and student affairs. Adding the university’s research arm to their purview expanded their storage needs considerably, and they initially used Google’s free storage tier for that data. As they outgrew the new limits on storage capacity in Google, the team purchased a petabyte-sized server for on-premises research data storage. That’s when Cal Poly Humboldt started looking for a better cloud storage and backup solution.
How do we get storage that we can expand quickly to meet our needs and not be locked into some physical piece of hardware?
Cade Webb, Deputy CIO, Cal Poly Humboldt
At first, Cal Poly Humboldt turned to Wasabi Cloud Storage for off-site storage and sent older backups to the cloud using Veeam Backup and Replication. Here’s how it worked:
Neither Veeam nor Wasabi could explain where the extra bills were coming from or help them understand how to avoid them. Every time they received a bill that was higher than expected, it caused a chain reaction of trying to understand the fees, buying extra capacity, and then modifying the system to try to avoid further bills. “It was a lot of work we didn’t anticipate,” Webb said.
“We were getting irritated,” remembers Webb. “Then we started hearing about Backblaze.” As a proof of concept, the Cal Poly Humboldt team bought 40TB of Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage to replace their file server backup. It worked so well that as soon as their three-year Wasabi contract ended, they immediately moved 110TB of enterprise data into Backblaze.
Today, all of Cal Poly Humboldt’s off-site storage and backups live in Backblaze. Data first moves to physical servers, and then backs up to their Backblaze B2 Bucket via Veeam. There are currently two types of data pushing to Backblaze:
A lot of times with cloud providers you underestimate the cost or learn something you wish you had known before you signed up. Backblaze has been as advertised; we haven’t seen any surprises.
Cade Webb, Deputy CIO, Cal Poly Humboldt
When Google deprecated the free education tier, Cal Poly Humboldt was notified that they had to cut hundreds of terabytes of research data or start incurring fees. Because their experience with Backblaze has been so positive, they continue to add capacity to their B2 Cloud Storage to keep all the research data backed up in the cloud with room to grow.
Predictable, straightforward billing has been one of the biggest benefits of Backblaze for Webb and his team. “The front office has not called me upset about surprise bills since we moved to Backblaze,” Webb said. Any time they want to launch a new storage backup project, procurement now knows exactly what to expect, making project kickoffs easier all around.
Instead of working with their front office to figure out where surprise bills came from, the IT Services team can focus on other initiatives like serving staff and student needs and building out Cal Poly Humboldt’s disaster recovery program.
Because Backblaze offers zero-cost egress for up to 3x average monthly data stored, Cal Poly Humboldt can build out a disaster recovery strategy without going back to the world of surprise bills and inflated fees. “It’s nice to know that building disaster recovery in Backblaze won’t change our cost model at all,” Webb said.
What’s nice about Backblaze is that we don't have to order and rack a bunch of hardware. We can just go to procurement, and you click a button and make it easy for us.
Cade Webb, Deputy CIO, Cal Poly Humboldt
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