How Spring Branch ISD overcame the CrowdStrike outage with Everpure backups

When the CrowdStrike update and associated outage adversely affected Windows devices in July 2024, many organizations were impacted. Just outside Houston, IT operations at the Spring Bank Independent School District (ISD) were among those affected.

Spring Branch ISD has over 31,000 children under its care across 46 schools, spanning 57 buildings and 6,000 staff members.

The organization faced significant challenges when the CrowdStrike outage hit, and it came at the worst possible time, given that summer school classes don’t run on Fridays.

“During the summer, school districts are primarily off on Friday, we work 4-10, so we’re closed on Fridays," Troy Neal, Spring Branch ISD’s executive director of cybersecurity and technology, told ITPro at Pure Accelerate 2026.

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“[We] woke up Friday morning, turned on the news, and there’s this banner running across that says ‘CrowdStrike outage’ and I’m like ‘we’re a CrowdStrike customer, is this really affecting us?’

“Outages can be lots of things, so I looked at my phone, had some messages, and [I said] let’s start checking the systems, and [I] notice[d] the phone system was down.”

This posed a problem for the organization, given that these systems are hosted on-prem, Neal explains. Further investigation showed staff members couldn’t access some critical services.

At this point, the scramble to recover, or at the very least establish what was happening, was on.

Disaster recovery with Everpure

Spring Branch ISD works with a range of hardware vendors for storage, recovery, and backup purposes, Neal explains. Among these are Hitachi, Dell, Veeam, and Everpure, formerly Pure Storage.

High-capacity, high-performance storage is critical for the organization, which manages more than 60,000 endpoints spanning Chromebooks, iPads, and various Windows devices at schools across the district.

When Neal started at Spring Branch ISD some seven years ago, the organization was in the process of refreshing its storage capabilities due to the sheer volume of CCTV footage they stored.

“We have 4,400 cameras in our school district,” he explains. “We store about four to six petabytes of data on just CCTV, so we started doing our due diligence.”

This exploratory process saw Neal and colleagues scour the market for options, eventually narrowing the field down to Dell, Everpure, and Hitachi. Budgetary constraints were a concern, he notes, particularly given that Spring Branch ISD is publicly funded.

An initial offer saw Neal faced with a $7.1 million price tag for six petabytes across two locations over 10 years. He felt this was actually good value, but it was outside of his budget, which was just over half that amount.

Hitachi ultimately met Spring Branch’s requests, and the organization secured vital storage infrastructure to meet its increasingly demanding data needs. But it was here that the relationship with Everpure blossomed.

“We were really impressed with Pure at the time,” he says. “In the cyber space, 3-2-1 is the standard for backup strategies. I like 4-2-1, [as] you can never have enough backups.”

“I’m a layered defense kind of guy for everything we do, and so we had an opportunity with some extra bond funds to bring in another solution to be our secondary backup.”

That deal saw Spring Branch ISD adopt FlashBlade//S and FlashBlade//E solutions, which provide users with high-speed, scale-out backup storage. Notably, Neal says that when the CrowdStrike outage hit, these proved vital.

The road to recovery

After the initial furore of the CrowdStrike outage and the impact on Spring Branch ISD dissipated, Neal says he was in some way glad that it was a “CrowdStrike outage, not a Spring Branch ISD outage, and caused by an adversary.”

Focusing on the task at hand, Spring Branch found itself in a similar situation to many organizations elsewhere in the world: dealing with a botched patch.

“We’re in the office by 6.30 am that morning,” he says. “We pulled out our incident response plan, and [said] this is a live exercise.”

“Our first thing was their patch,” Neal adds. “That didn’t work too well.”

The initial workaround saw Neal’s team revert to a Veeam backup, which he says was “just a regular-sized virtual machine (VM) that we had”. This was expected to take around 45 minutes for a single VM.

Spring Branch ISD has over 200 VMs across its IT estate, meaning the recovery time could take days. With summer school students and staff expected back in on Monday morning, this could prove disastrous.

“We [said] this isn't going to work, let’s try Pure too.”

The resulting backup “took minutes,” Neal notes, adding “this is the performance we paid for and why we chose Pure.”

Leaning on Everpure backups, Neal says critical services were back up and running within around four hours. Thereafter, ancillary services were up by around noon.

“About six hours later, we were up and running, and then we did some cleanup work over the weekend. We also had to wait on some of our owners of some of these systems to test them, validate them, and then by the end of the weekend, we rank a whole other snapshot of every single VM,” he says.

“We had some good clean states going forward, and Monday came around, and summer school went on. Nobody knew the difference.”

Looking ahead, Neal says Spring Branch ISD plans to continue - and expand - on its relationship with Everpure. The organization is going back to a 3-2-1-style cluster, and recently brought in another FlashArray//C solution for additional backup.

Notably, the school district is also moving to EverGreen//One, the company’s storage as a service (STaaS) platform. This aims to unify on-prem and cloud storage resources, providing users with a single data storage platform based on a subscription. Neal notes that the flexibility and ease of use associated with this setup were particularly appealing.

“I’m going with a subscription-based model. So I don’t care what the hardware is, because that’s Pure’s problem to figure out and manage,” he jests.