Case Study — rediCloud

rediCloud Adds a Storage Offering to its Cloud Services Portfolio with Cloudian S3-Compatible Object Storage

Multi-tenant storage solution enables rediCloud to provide high-quality service to customers

rediCloud, a division of ATSG, is an enterprise-grade cloud service provider that hosts and manages IT infrastructure for organizations through its two data centers in Secaucus, NJ and Chicago, IL. The company differentiates itself from other cloud service providers by offering a high-touch, personalized, service-oriented offering to its customers.

rediCloud experts work directly with customers to ensure the level of cloud services they buy matches their business needs. The firm’s delivery model combines a customer-centric hybrid cloud experience with the pricing and flexibility of a public cloud.

Seeking an Easy-to-Manage, Multi-Tenant Storage System

To support its data protection and storage services, rediCloud sought an S3-compatible storage system. A key requirement was flexible management so they could quickly customize service delivery to match customer needs. The firm had tried another vendor’s solution, but found it to be unreliable and difficult to manage.

“Our first stab at an object storage led us to a solution that required a lot of administrative effort, which is the opposite of how our team works,” said Allen Hall, rediCloud director of cloud engineering. “We like solutions that are turnkey, that scale easily and don’t require a lot of work on our end. As a service provider, we also needed true multi-tenancy features and full S3 compatibility for our customer’s applications.”

Hall and his team began searching for a new object storage solution that was hardware agnostic and offered multi-protocol support and multi-tenancy. Finally, they needed a solution that would reduce operating costs while ensuring bullet-proof data protection.

Full Feature Set, Compatible with Cisco UCS Servers

After evaluating multiple options, rediCloud selected Cloudian HyperStore. Available as an appliance and as software-defined storage, rediCloud chose to deploy Cloudian software on Cisco UCS servers.

Cloudian HyperStore supports the functionality required by rediCloud including full S3 API compatibility, multi-tenancy, and simple management.

“We selected Cloudian because we needed an object-based storage solution that was turnkey and could scale easily without a lot of administrative effort,” Hall said. “We wanted to spend less time managing our storage and more time helping our customers be innovative in the cloud. Cloudian fit the bill for us because of its multi-tenant capabilities, proven S3 API compatibility and out-of-the-box HTML user portal.”

Unlike rediCloud’s previous object storage solution, Cloudian made it easy for the company to perform simple administrative tasks. For example, with the previous solution, rediCloud engineers had to contact tech support to perform something as basic as replacing disks. With Cloudian, their  engineers could easily manage the environment and quickly complete maintenance tasks.

Multi-Tenancy

As a multi-tenant solution, HyperStore software gives role-based access to rediCloud system and group administrators and to users. Advanced identity and access management features allow system administrators to provision and manage groups and users, define specific classes of service for groups and users, and configure billing and charge-back policies.

Quality of Service (QoS) controls allow administrators to ensure performance SLAs are met. The self-service portal lets rediCloud customers manage their own storage environment exactly as if they had a dedicated system.

Easy Integration with Rubrik

A Rubrik-based data protection service is one of rediCloud’s offerings. This offering includes backup services for virtual machines hosted both in rediCloud data centers and on-premises customer environments. Cloudian is certified compatible with Rubrik, allowing the Cloudian system to act as a backup target. With Cloudian, rediCloud could quickly scale its backup environment, allowing it to meet growing demand while minimizing up-front cost.

“Cloudian’s storage was simple and extremely straightforward,” said Bernard Meirson, rediCloud cloud architect. “With Cloudian, we’ve eliminated the operational headaches associated with object storage, which will help us extend and further develop our offerings with better value and new features.”