Customer Case Study: Veristor

IT Service Provider Drives Business Growth with Cloudian-based Offerings

Over the past few years, organizations have increasingly turned to IT service providers to help manage growing, more complex data sets. To fully capitalize on this new business opportunity, these providers must ensure they have a modern infrastructure to meet their customers’ evolving demands. Veristor, a leading provider of transformative business solutions, recognized this imperative and replaced its SAN backup systems with Cloudian object storage. The Cloudian platform has enabled Veristor to grow its business with new, highly scalable and cost-effective services that deliver enhanced customer value.

Overcoming SAN Storage Cost and Scale Challenges

Started in 2001 and based in Georgia, Veristor helps its customers accelerate the time-to-value for the software, infrastructure and systems they deploy. The company’s expertise includes advanced data center, security, networking, hybrid cloud and big data technologies.

Veristor previously relied on a SAN system but was faced with increasing challenges as the amount of data it was managing grew.

“With the limited scalability of our SAN infrastructure, we found ourselves spending more time on managing the storage than on the actual services we were providing,” says Jason Grant, Director of Storage & Data Solutions at Veristor. “In addition, maintaining the hardware was expensive.”

Seeking a more modern storage platform, Veristor evaluated all the major object storage solutions in the market and ultimately selected Cloudian’s HyperStore, deploying multiple appliances across redundant data centers.

“Beyond its infinite scalability, we were particularly attracted to Cloudian’s software-defined storage approach and centralized management,” says Nick Martino, Solutions Architect at Veristor. “It meant we would no longer have to manage what seemed like thousands of different storage nodes or custom-builds.

“The Cloudian solution also offered significant TCO advantages, at about 60% less cost than the nearest competing solution.”

Cloudian Object Storage: A Foundation for Multiple Service Offerings

With the Cloudian platform in place, Veristor began offering standalone Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS).

“While we previously provided storage within our overall managed services offerings, Cloudian has enabled us to provide S3-based STaaS on its own,” says Martino. “As a result, we’ve expanded our business by giving customers that don’t want full managed services the ability to store data from the growing ecosystem of S3 application workloads.”
Cloudian’s cost efficiency and geo-distribution are also key to the STaaS offering.

“We’re able to include the cost of bandwidth and two copies of data in geo-dispersed locations as part of our overall offering—all while still remaining competitive on pricing,” says Martino.

“This makes it extremely attractive to customers that want to use public cloud compute,” adds Grant. “We can provide additional availability with ‘cloud adjacent’ storage technology inclusive of ingress and egress fees.”
Where needed, Veristor also leverages Cloudian’s HyperFile software for file connectivity.

“One of our customers uses Veristor STaaS for archiving video footage,” Grant explains. “In this case, they had an application that wasn’t S3 compatible, so they use HyperFile as a front-end to move data to the HyperStore platform.”

In addition to STaaS, Veristor leverages Cloudian’s integration with Commvault as the foundation for its Backup-as-a-Service offering and a core part of its Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service solution.

The company also recently introduced Cloudian’s S3 Object Lock feature in its backup services. Object Lock makes backup data copies immutable and, therefore, invulnerable to hacker encryption or deletion. This data immutability—certified in government testing—ensures availability of an uninfected copy for reliable recovery in the event of a ransomware attack.

Looking further forward, Veristor is exploring other Cloudian-based services, including video archives, compliance and—through HyperStore’s integration with Splunk SmartStore—big data.

“Our partnership with Cloudian has been great,” says Grant. “It’s enabled us to pursue new market opportunities, deliver enhanced value to our customers and drive more profitable growth.”