Customer Case Study: HostedBizz

Canadian Cloud Services Provider Delivers S3-Based Sovereign Data Storage and Backup with Cloudian

As one of Canada’s premier cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, HostedBizz wanted to ensure its customers could take advantage of the rapidly growing ecosystem of S3 applications and maintain data sovereignty. After realizing that its traditional storage provider couldn’t fully meet its S3 storage needs, HostedBizz deployed Cloudian’s native S3 object storage as a backup target for Veeam and the foundation for a new Storage-as-a-Service offering. This native S3 compatibility—along with Cloudian’s tremendous scalability and cost-effectiveness—has enabled HostedBizz to capitalize on new market opportunities, including the increasing number of software vendors that are leveraging S3 object storage as an archive target.

Traditional Storage System Can’t Meet Modern Data Demands

Based in Ottawa with 100% Canadian operations, HostedBizz provides an integrated suite of IT infrastructure services through a network of IT partners and resellers. These services include cloud servers, backup, disaster recovery, file sharing, remote desktop services and private network access.

With the increasing number of S3 applications being developed, HostedBizz saw the need to provide its customers with robust S3-compatible storage. However, the company discovered that its legacy storage system couldn’t deliver the scalability and other key management features required when dealing with modern application workloads.

Management Features Ideal for Service Providers

HostedBizz initially looked to its existing storage vendors—including Dell EMC and NetApp—for an S3 storage solution. However, after finding that their solutions were either complex or expensive, the company began exploring offerings from other providers.

In the case of Cloudian, HostedBizz was impressed with the density of Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage platform, the ability to easily scale it
and the increased performance as additional storage nodes were added. “We also liked the multi-tenancy, quality-of-service and billing charge-back features,” says Paul Butcher, co-founder at HostedBizz. “Another key selling point was HyperStore’s bucket-level management, which provides the ability to do replication at the bucket level.”

With bucket-level management, service providers can enable some customers to do real-time, synchronous replication and others to do
asynchronous replication, rather than only being able to offer a one-size-fits-all solution.

As a final step in its consideration, HostedBizz conducted an extensive PoC to fully test HyperStore.

“We threw everything at it to make sure Cloudian could really handle all S3 calls, and it easily did,” says Butcher. “It also integrated seamlessly
with Veeam.”

Cloudian HyperStore for Veeam Backup and Ransomware Protection

As a start, HostedBizz purchased three HyperStore appliances for a total capacity of 1 PB deployed in its Calgary data center. The company uses
HyperStore as the backup target for Veeam, including backup of all Office 365 data.

“Our Office 365 backup business has grown by 60% since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and HyperStore has enabled us to easily meet this increased demand,” says Butcher.

HostedBizz is also providing ransomware protection through Cloudian’s and Veeam’s support for S3 Object Lock. Object Lock enables users to
make backup data copies immutable and, therefore, invulnerable to hacker encryption or deletion. This certified data immutability ensures the availability of an uninfected copy for reliable recovery in the event of a ransomware attack.

In addition to being a backup target for Veeam, HyperStore serves as the foundation for HostedBizz’s new HBS3 Storage-as-a-Service offering. With this service, the company’s customers have a limitlessly scalable and fully native S3-compatible object storage platform, enabling them to capitalize on the rapidly expanding ecosystem of S3-based applications.

HBS3 also preserves complete data sovereignty, a key differentiator from services offered by U.S. cloud providers. Although these cloud providers may offer assurances that a customer’s data will be stored within that customer’s national borders, that doesn’t guarantee full protection from access by U.S. law enforcement.

Looking toward the future, HostedBizz plans to build out its Cloudian-based storage infrastructure.

“Our experience with Cloudian has been great, and we expect it will continue to play a central role as our business grows,” says Butcher.