University of Arizona Uses Zetta.net to Digitally Archive its 6 Million-Piece History

However, Coleman says Central IT was not a good fit for the Center’s archival needs.

“As we were looking at the various components of the support the Center was getting from Central IT, we realized that the cost of backup and archiving critical resources by the Center was one, very expensive, and two, did not meet the actual use cases for the Center,” says Coleman, Technology Project Manager at the University of Arizona. “We had to find a better solution.”

Coleman says the university chose to go with Zetta due to its ease of use for non-technical users, and its speed.

“The setup product offered us a solution that could be managed by someone without deep technical knowledge,” he says. “It’s a solution that doesn’t require people to know about scripting, development, etc. It’s a very simple system to use and understand. It is also dead fast. Every other solution we looked at was four to five times slower in terms of bringing content back. We actually have better throughput loading data into Zetta than we have putting data into the files across campus.”

Coleman says the only downside about Zetta was its high cost.

He says due to budget cuts, the University of Arizona decreased its usage of Zetta.

Now, he says the university only uses Zetta for mission-critical data.

“We are not using Zetta for as much content as we did previously,” Coleman says. “That largely is because of the financial situation of the University of Arizona and in education in general. The various units were asked to reduce budgets from five to ten percent, on top of many budget reductions over the years…We’re using Zetta for mission critical document data, our large archival data we have moved into the Amazon glacier space.”

However, Coleman says the university’s experience with Zetta was outstanding.

“Zetta is one of the best user support organizations I’ve ever dealt with,” he says. “How many vendors call you up the next day and say, so, does it work, are you happy? They do this all the time. We’d solve problems and they’d call us back the next day to make sure that everything is cool. My experience in this industry is that this is unheard of.”