MSP Datastore365 provides secure online backup to organisations and individuals throughout the UK and Europe.
Key challenges
Although Datastore365 powered its online backup service with Asigra’s Cloud Backup software, the actual hardware at its two datacentres came from various vendors, meaning that a significant amount of time was spent managing the different systems. Datastore365’s data vault was almost at capacity and the company was starting to experience performance issues with the current storage configuration.
The team 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, cost was a key purchasing factor; Datastore365 needed to ensure that it chose a storage solution that was competitively priced, allowing it to engage the competition by offering a cost-effective service to existing and prospective clients.
Solution
The MSP’s IT director, Gary Witts, comments: “We met with several big-name storage vendors, but couldn’t find a solution that ticked every box. Then distributer Zycko recommended we take a look at Huawei Symantec’s Oceanspace N8000 series, clustered Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions.”
Huawei Symantec is a joint venture, combining Huawei’s expertise in network infrastructure and Symantec’s in security and storage software. The Oceanspace N8000 series is a unified storage platform, which uses a full redundancy design to ensure 99.999 percent availability, and supports clustered NAS engine nodes in active/active mode.
David Galton-Fenzi, Zycko’s group sales and marketing director, explains: “We suggested the Oceanspace N8300 because it offers a combination of reliability and affordability. Its scalable design will allow them to improve capacity and performance independently of each other, whilst still hitting the right price point for their customers. The Asigra platform and Huawei Symantec solution marry well; the former provides secure, on-demand online back-up, and the latter supports this with highly-resilient, flexible storage.” Zycko tested the NAS solution in its £1m Cirencester lab with data provided by Datastore365.
Installation at Datastore365’s two datacentres in Maidenhead and Milton Keynes was carried out by the vendor’s own engineers, with Zycko assisting in the migration of all customer data onto the new system. Witts estimates the entire implementation took around three months from start to finish: “We were the first Asigra MSP to utilise the Huawei Symantec offering, so it was a real leap of faith – we knew competitors were working with proven EMC and NetApp solutions, however, the competitive price point and constant support from Zycko and Huawei Symantec, convinced us that this was the right solution for us.”
End user benefits
One of the main benefits of the implementation was the amount of time saved: “Before the new NAS solution was installed, we dedicated one team member to monitoring and checking the multiple vendor solutions at both our datacentres,” explains Witts. “Now 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.”
Future development
The success of the implementation means that Datastore365 is now confident about future growth. Witts continues: “The online back-up market is becoming more competitive every day, so it is vital that we can continue to offer value for money to our customers. Whereas some other companies offering online back-up may quote a low price for initial data storage, but then rapidly increase their prices as they have to overhaul their hardware, our decision to use Huawei Symantec’s scalable clustered storage, enables us to offer the best deals on a sustained basis.”
The company is also looking to expand its Virtual Machine (VM) hosting platform further, and estimates that this cloud computing facility will overtake the online back-up portion of the business in the next couple of years, as hosted service demand grows.
Witts concludes: “We have been delighted with the implementation. We asked the team at Zycko to find us a solution that would meet both our current and future needs, and they have provided us with a platform that may not be from one of the best known or most established vendors, but has more than delivered on service, price and scalability.”
