Customer Case Study: 2M-IT

Finnish IT Service Provider Reduces Data Archiving Costs by 50% with Cloudian

2M-IT is Finland’s largest publicly owned provider of IT services for the social and healthcare sectors. When the company’s growing data archive requirements presented a need for a more cost-effective storage system to replace its existing NAS system, 2M-IT worked with Arrow Electronics to find a better solution. After evaluating a number of offerings, 2M-IT deployed Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage platform, resulting in 50% cost savings and a much more efficient data protection infrastructure.

Overcoming NAS Capacity, Management and Cost Challenges

2M-IT collects and manages customer data, with approximately 1 PB backed up via Rubrik backup software. To meet its long-term backup target, the company employed NAS systems at three data centres. Data was replicated between sites to ensure data availability in the event of a site failure. As the amount of data being managed continued to grow, the NAS system’s lack of geo-distribution capabilities and growing expense became significant challenges.

“With our NAS system no longer able to meet our backup and archiving needs, and Cloudian already in mind, we reached out to Arrow to help us deploy a new solution,” says Juha Rouhiainen, Manager at 2M-IT. “Our key selection criteria included scalability, cost-effectiveness and integration with Rubrik.”

After reviewing multiple solutions from different vendors, 2M-IT selected Cloudian’s HyperStore native S3-compatible object storage system as the foundation of a revamped archiving platform.

“In addition to HyperStore’s limitless scalability, we were impressed with its geo-distribution and unified management capabilities,”
says Rouhiainen.

Arrow, together with local partners, worked to deploy 1U HyperStore appliances for 2M-IT. A total of nine nodes were distributed across three data centres located in two cities, for a total capacity of 1.5 PB.

Due to COVID-19 travel limitations, Arrow provided virtual training sessions to ensure that the 2M-IT team was able to get up and running on the system as quickly as possible.

“Arrow’s first priority was to ensure that the storage setup would meet 2M-IT’s needs 100%,” says Peter From, Partner Development Manager at Arrow. “Although we weren’t able to do the live training we typically provide, we were able to drive the project forward smoothly by working closely together with 2M-IT, our local partners and Cloudian.”

Next-generation Archiving

With the new Cloudian solution in place, 2M-IT no longer has to worry about scalability challenges, as extra nodes can quickly be added without interruption whenever needed to boost archiving capacity.

HyperStore ensures data protection through erasure coding, with data stored across all three data centres. In the event of a site failure, data can be reconstructed from the data at other sites. Compared to three-way data replication, this disaster recovery method delivers twice the storage efficiency, which substantially reduces the storage costs while ensuring high data durability.

“Cloudian also provides unified management of the geo-distributed HyperStore nodes,” says Rouhiainen. “We now manage only one system, rather than managing separate systems at three sites, as we did with our legacy NAS system. In addition, HyperStore works seamlessly with Rubrik and, from a TCO standpoint, is approximately half the cost of the NAS system.

“Thanks to Cloudian and Arrow, we now have a modern archiving platform that enables us to meet the needs of our expanding customer base and drive further success in our business.”