Customer Case Study: Eagle Technologies

IT Service Provider Meets Evolving Customer Backup Demands with Cloudian

Eagle Technologies is a leading IT service provider and reseller in the U.S. Midwest that helps customers meet their data storage, protection and management needs. With the increasing interest in cloud backup, Eagle wanted an S3-compatible object storage solution that could serve as a target for its Backup-as-a-Service customers.

After evaluating several offerings, the company selected Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage platform, which has provided the scalability, resiliency and cost-effectiveness Eagle needed to meet customers’ modern storage demands. In addition, the company recently deployed Cloudian’s new observability and analytics software, gaining greater insight into their storage environment and helping drive increased operational efficiencies.

Need for S3-based Backup

Founded nearly 40 years ago, Eagle Technologies provides support and services such as Commvault-based managed backup services to customers across the Midwestern U.S. A few years ago, the company saw increased demand for S3-compatible storage to support Commvault-based backup to the cloud. To meet this new demand, Eagle began looking for an object storage solution that would easily integrate with Commvault.

In addition to Cloudian, the company tested Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, SwiftStack and several other open-source offerings.

“In the case of HyperStore, we really liked what we saw in the PoC—from the resiliency to the design of the peer-to-peer architecture using Cassandra database to its cost-effectiveness,” says Adam Svoboda, Principal Cyber Security Strategist at Eagle. “We also tried throwing things at it that crashed the other systems and found it was really difficult to break the Cloudian solution.”

For its initial deployment, Eagle installed a 12-node HyperStore cluster, providing 700 TB of useable storage in its data center.

Easy, Non-Disruptive Scalability

Today, Eagle has approximately 2 PB of Cloudian storage, with the primary use case being a backup target for Commvault. The company also uses HyperStore with other backup software such as Veeam.

“HyperStore has been a great addition to our infrastructure,” says Svoboda. “It integrates seamlessly with Commvault and other backup solutions, and it has saved us not only on up-front costs but also on maintaining the solution over time.”

Another key benefit has been HyperStore’s non-disruptive scalability.

“We can easily add nodes as we scale without service interruption, and if there is a problem with one of the nodes, it’s isolated, so it doesn’t impact the rest of the cluster,” Svoboda explains. “Also, as nodes get added, the performance increases across the cluster.”

Observability and Analytics Software

One of Cloudian’s key strengths has been its manageability, and Eagle has been particularly excited about its experience with Cloudian’s new HyperIQ observability and analytics software. HyperIQ enables customers to proactively and efficiently manage Cloudian storage and related infrastructure across on-premises and hybrid cloud environments—all from a single interface.

“HyperIQ helps us identify potential hardware problems before they arise and address them proactively,” says Svoboda. “The dashboards look incredible, and we love the ability to customize them. The user behavior analytics also provide insights into usage patterns, enhancing security and enabling better resource allocation.”

Summing up the experience with Cloudian, Svoboda says it’s been a great partnership.

“HyperStore is a terrific solution, and the support from the Cloudian team has been first-rate,” he says. “All of this helps Eagle in continuing to deliver high-value services to our customers.”