Customer Case Study: Valbury Group

Indonesian Financial Services Company Replaces NAS With Cloudian Object Storage

Organizations are increasingly discovering that their NAS systems can’t meet their storage demands. That was the case for Valbury Group, an Indonesian financial services company that was frustrated with the limited scalability, painful migrations and the resulting downtime of its NAS infrastructure. As a replacement, Valbury deployed Cloudian object storage, which not only provides the scalability it needs but also simplified management and ransomware protection. With Cloudian, Valbury has reduced its storage footprint by 25% and improved performance by roughly 50%. In addition, the Cloudian solution has enabled the company’s development team to take advantage of the growing ecosystem of S3-based applications.

Problems with Legacy NAS System

Headquartered in Jakarta, Valbury Group is a 20-year-old company with roots as a pioneer in the Indonesian futures market. Today it offers licensed financial investment and brokerage products and services to both institutional and retail customers within Indonesia and beyond. Prior to engaging Cloudian, Valbury used a Synology NAS system to store and protect its data. In recent years, the drawbacks of the solution became more evident.

“We had to perform manual backups, which was time-consuming and inefficient,” says Adhithia Irvan, Head of IT Infrastructure, at Valbury. “The NAS system also wasn’t very scalable and needed to be replaced every three years. That meant difficult migrations with significant downtime.”

Recognizing that the NAS problems would only get worse as its data grew, Valbury decided to look for a better solution.

Adopting a Modern Storage Solution

Taking into account its current and future needs, the company established scalability, robust data protection and ease of management as its top criteria for a new storage infrastructure. In addition to Cloudian, Valbury considered MinIO, Ceph and FreeNAS offerings but rejected them due to limited scalability and S3 compatibility.

Valbury ultimately selected Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage platform citing its guaranteed S3 API compatibility and ease of adding capacity among the key reasons for the choice.

“Because HyperStore is object storage, it’s massively scalable and easy to deploy” says Irvan. “However, what we particularly liked about Cloudian’s solution is the fully native S3 compatibility and the fact that you can start small with only a few nodes and easily scale without any downtime or disruption. In addition, it’s a software-defined solution, so we knew we wouldn’t be locked into a specific brand of hardware. Another key feature was ransomware protection, namely the ability to make backup copies immutable and therefore invulnerable to hackers.”

Saving Space, Improving Performance and Simplifying Management

By deploying the Cloudian solution, Valbury has reduced its storage footprint by 25% while improving overall performance by roughly 50%.

The company has also greatly simplified its backup process. Previously, Valbury had to do double backups to different NAS systems whereas now there’s just a single, automated backup to Cloudian.

However, data protection is not the only use case for HyperStore.

“Cloudian also provides the storage foundation for our compliance management system,” explains Irvan. “In addition, HyperStore’s fully native S3 compatibility means we can take advantage of the rapidly expanding ecosystem of S3 applications. This makes it a perfect platform for development of our document management solution and private cloud storage by our internal development team.”

Another key benefit of deploying Cloudian has been simplified management.

“Before we had to manage multiple NAS islands separately and migrate data every 3-5 years,” says Irvan. “With Cloudian, we can manage our entire storage infrastructure as one from the Cloudian Management Console, and we no longer have to do data migrations or forklift upgrades.”

Moving forward, Valbury is considering using HyperStore as the storage foundation for big data analytics applications.

Summing up the experience with Cloudian, Irvan says “It’s a great solution for meeting our storage demands, and we look forward to expanding our HyperStore deployment as our data needs continue to evolve.”