Case Study — Klik.Solutions

Klik.Solutions Delivers World-Class Backup-as-a-Service with Lenovo/Cloudian

Klik.Solutions is an innovative IT solutions and managed service provider (MSP), offering a wide range of services to its clients, including managed infrastructure, managed cloud, managed security, and technology assessments. The firm’s clients include Unilever, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Kaiser Permanente, Carlyle Group, University of Maryland, and LSI. Klik.Solutions is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland and has operations in Washington, D.C., Dallas, and Amsterdam.

“We looked at three different S3-enabled products. Cloudian was by far the most complete solution, and it was multi-tenant ready from the get-go. No other solutions offered the combination of features we needed.”

Arthur Olshansky, Chief Technology Officer, Klik.Solutions

Private Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service

Klik.Solutions has seen strong interest from their customers in backup and data retention services that let them move specific data off-premise. Many enterprise customers that engage with Klik.Solutions are struggling to manage the growth and cost of structured data on-premise. They’ve had to continually buy ahead of need and effectively over-provision expensive storage, even for backup and archive data. On top of that, they needed keep backup copies offsite.

Offsite data protection is a core competency for Klik.Solutions. They wanted to offer customers a private cloud alternative that would stand shoulder-to-shoulder both technically and economically with public cloud solutions. “Our customers value knowing where their data is, and being able to access it immediately without worrying about data retrieval costs,” said Marc Winter, Chief Marketing Officer at Klik.Solutions.

Predictable Costs

One benefit Klik.Solutions offers its customers is cost predictability from month to month, a feature not found in all cloud offerings. Winter continued, “Our customers tell us, ‘Public cloud is cheap, but as soon as I need to get data back, my bill goes through the roof.’” With Cloudian, there are no access charges, thus allowing Klik.Solutions to ensure consistent billing for its customers.”

Finding a Solution for Klik.Solutions Customers

Klik.Solutions needed a scalable, cost-effective private cloud storage solution that was multi-tenant ready. Whatever solution they ultimately chose would have to be:

SCALABLE: Grow with Klik.Solutions and its customers, and work seamlessly across distributed data centers.

COST-EFFECTIVE: It would have to let Klik.Solutions deliver a pay-as-you go model with minimal up-front deployment costs at a competitive cost per GB.

MULTI-TENANT READY: It also needed to be designed from the get-go for multitenant, service provider environments. Many solutions Klik.Solutions investigated required unacceptable work arounds.

FULLY AMAZON S3-ENABLED: Most of the backup and archiving products in the Klik.Solutions portfolio support S3 APIs. A solution like this would give them the ability to support everything from database and email archiving to long-term video storage.

Success with Lenovo Powered by Cloudian

Klik.Solutions selected Cloudian on Lenovo for its out-of-box multi-tenant capability and strong S3 integration. “We looked at several products, picked them apart,” said, Arthur Olshansky, Chief Technology Officer at Klik.Solutions. “We felt that Lenovo/Cloudian was the most complete solution. It’s well put together and is ready for production. The ease of use is terrific, plus it includes QoS and billing, two key features for us.”

With Cloudian, Klik.Solutions has a predictable cost model and guaranteed S3 interoperability with the backup solutions in its portfolio, such as Rubrik, Commvault, Veritas, and Cloudberry. “S3 compatibility is very important to us, and the Cloudian software excels here with its 100% native S3 architecture. We’ve seen zero S3 interoperability issues with Cloudian, which to us means great uptime and satisfied customers,” Olshansky said.

The Future with Lenovo/Cloudian

The Lenovo/Cloudian solution gives Klik.Solutions the ability to support many different customer scenarios and workloads as they grow. It also gives them the flexibility to offer fully private cloud or hybrid cloud solutions, with seamlessly scalable capacity. “Cloudian’s scale-out architecture means we’ll never run out of disk space,” said Olshansky.

INDUSTRY

Managed Service Provider

REQUIRMENTS

• Out-of-the-box multi-tenancy and billing support
• Cost-effective scalability
• Full Amazon S3 compatibility

BENEFITS

Out of the box DRaaS features:

• Multi-tenancy
• Billing/chargeback
• Quality of service (QoS)
• Quotas
• Scale-as-you-grow storage
• No data transfer charges
• High-touch global support

RESULTS

Successful and fast pilot and deployment supporting 118TB on 3 nodes, with future plans to expand to Dallas next, and then to other Klik.Solutions data centers globally.

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