Komprise expands data management coverage to Azure

Duquesne University switches from Capex to Opex with Komprise

The Computing and Technology Services (CTS) at Duquesne University based out of Pittsburgh. provides all IT-related services for the school's faculty and students. This includes networking, email, support and storage.

Matthew Madill

CTS bought Komprise three years ago, but before then, it handled storage using a "very legacy approach," according to CTS storage systems administrator Matthew Madill. A "customer," which could be a professor looking for storage for their research data, would submit a ticket, and CTS would carve out space in a storage array for them and bill their department for that capacity. Because this storage purchase was treated as a one-time transaction, the customers expected to have the space they paid for even if the old storage hardware aged out and got replaced, forcing CTS to eat the cost of the new hardware.

Komprise allowed Madill to move customers' older data off to the cloud and bill them on a repeating basis. Customers could still access those files, but they were no longer taking up space on the storage array. The subscription fee helped CTS recoup some of the storage costs, but it had another effect. Madill said customers would more closely analyze their storage usage and needs when they're paying for it monthly.

Three years ago, CTS bought a NetApp all-flash array and wanted to avoid having to ask Duquesne for more money when it came time to expand its capacity. Madill's team wanted a tool to move data off and keep the array below a certain capacity. Madill happened upon Komprise at a storage vendor's conference and purchased it.

Komprise proved useful when COVID-19 hit. With students attending classes from home, Madill said there was a massive uptick in professors wanting to save their lectures on the cloud. He said Komprise allowed CTS to scale its cloud operations and accommodate the influx of files that needed to be stored.

"When COVID came, every school wanted to put more stuff in the cloud. Komprise gave us the flexibility and scalability to do that," Madill said.

CTS uses Wasabi's cloud, but a small group is dabbling in Azure. Madill said he's happy to see Komprise supporting more environments, but there are other features he'd like to see. He said some professors want visibility into the back end and the ability to self-service where their files reside, so he's hoping for role-based access control in a future release.