Datasore365

Challenge

Datastore365 provides easily- managed, affordable, secure online backup to businesses, organisations and individuals throughout the UK and Europe. The company’s customers range from one-person offices to large corporations with hundreds of locations.

Although Datastore365 powered its secure online backup service with the award-winning Asigra Cloud Backup™ software, the actual hardware at its two data centres came from various vendors, meaning that a significant amount of time was spent managing the different systems, ensuring the highest performance possible; in fact, monitoring the multi-vendor storage took up almost all of one employee’s working hours. Datastore365 needed a storage solution that could quickly and securely react to increasing storage and capacity demands from customers, while providing the most resilient and highly-available configuration possible. However, price was also a key factor.

Online backup is sold on a ‘per gigabyte, per month’ basis and Datastore365 needed a storage solution that was not only reliable and secure, but also competitively priced, allowing it to swiftly expand and engage the competition by offering a cost-effective service to existing and prospective clients.

Solution

The Datastore365 team looked at a variety of different storage vendors before settling on a solution from Huawei. The OceanStor N8000 series is a unified storage platform, which uses a full redundancy design to ensure 99.999% availability, and supports clustered NAS engine nodes in active/ active mode. All requests are load- balanced across all available processing capacity – if a failure occurs on a node, another node in the network intelligently takes the slack. The entire implementation took around three months from start to finish and as the first Asigra Managed Service Provider (MSP) to use the Huawei offering, it was a real leap of faith. However, the competitive price point and constant support from Zycko and Huawei, convinced the company that it was the right solution for them.

Value

Value One of the main benefits of the implementation was the amount of time saved as a result of no longer having to manage the multi-vendor system. IT director Gary Witt explains: “Before the new NAS solution was installed, we dedicated one team member to monitoring and checking the multiple vendor solutions at both our data centres – now the new storage is up and running, that employee has the opportunity to work on technical development projects, helping grow the business. Inbuilt features like the Integrated Storage Manager provide excellent management capability.” Witt was apprehensive of potential teething problems, but any issues were soon resolved: “We were extremely impressed with the level of service and support from Huawei.

They always gave us the impression that we were their top priority; at one point they were waking people up in the middle of the night and getting teams of engineers together to solve technical issues! “We knew that as we were the first Asigra provider to use this hardware, we would be treading new ground, but the impressive levels of customer service we received and the quality and price of the kit, mean we would happily recommend Huawei to other Asigra providers.”