Somerville

Leading MSP scales its data protection business and achieves -30% TCO savings

By scaling its data protection business with Scality, Somerville gives customers peace of mind while decreasing operational costs.

As a leading Australian company in end-to-end network solutions, Somerville has decades of experience providing resilient, readily-available data storage for customers. The firm offers a cloud service to backup and protect customer data, powered by Veeam backup software.

But as Somerville’s data protection practice grew, customers’ storage requirements grew with it, making it harder to keep up.

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Somerville & Scality

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Challenges

Lack of data storage scalability

making new customer onboarding slow and costly

Too many silos

jeopardizing efficient forecasting and scaling

Worries about restoring customer data

quickly and reliably in the face of threats

CEO and Founder Craig Somerville explains: “As the business scaled, data sets were getting bigger and backup times started getting longer. The scalability of backend storage became an issue.” More than anything else, the Somerville team worried about the security of their customers’ data.

“There were sleepless nights. We engineered everything as securely as we could. We micro-segmented and did everything to keep customers safe. But often, a customer’s data and the security of that data is beyond our control if we’re not controlling their server platforms.”

There were other concerns, too. Running out of storage made it harder to onboard new customers, which limited their ability to increase revenue and scale. “We had multiple arrays in different data centers,” Craig says. “Every time a new customer joined, we’d face not having enough storage to onboard them.”

“Having customer data spread across different arrays meant they had to split data sets, causing data silos. “It became especially challenging when we had a customer’s data sitting on one array, and we ran out of space on that array. We had to split data sets and that became really messy,” Craig says. On top of all of that, keeping everything running smoothly was becoming stressful and expensive for the team.

“We were spending increasing amounts of labor and man-hours trying to keep all platforms operational while scaling.”

Solution

Scality RING S3 object storage

delivered by HPE GreenLake

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Apollo 4200 system

Veeam Backup & Replication

+ Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365

Scality + HPE + Veeam = scalable, secure, cost-effective

To scale the data storage services Somerville offers, the company implemented a petabyte-scale Scality RING stretched across three sites in Sydney and Melbourne (for zero RPO/RTO site protection) on HPE Apollo 4200 servers. Since the initial deployment, they’ve doubled capacity and are looking to add more workloads to expand their customer offerings.

Veeam writes backup data to Scality RING over the S3 API. This data is immediately protected with object lock, guaranteeing immutability and unbreakable ransomware protection. The delivery of Scality S3 object storage with HPE GreenLake provides scalable performance and pay-as-you-grow flexibility.

The solution helps Somerville manage unlimited amounts of data with reduced risk, easier management, and at lower cost for both them and their customers.

“From an operational perspective, bringing a customer in is far easier now than it would’ve been prior to Scality,” Craig says. “Scality works hand in hand with the Veeam Availability Suite, which allows us to enable a customer onto the platform much more quickly and smoothly than before.”

Instead of worrying about data silos, Somerville manages all customer data from a single pane of glass. “Scality gives us worry-free capacity expansion to any level of capacity and performance. We can now scale out all customer data on one platform, which is fundamentally important for us.” Craig says.

Somerville and their customers get a geographically dispersed, highly resilient solution with zero RPO/RTO, 100% availability and 14 nines of durability. All for a fraction of the effort they needed previously:

“We have one engineer who manages the platform day-to-day,” Craig says. “He spends more time on improvements and developing the platform than the time the entire team used to spend just keeping the lights on. It’s completely changed the way we manage the data protection practice.”

Scality’s immutable object storage extends Veeam’s enterprise-grade capabilities, ensuring Somerville’s total confidence in their ability to keep customer data secure and safe from ransomware exfiltration, modification or destruction.

“We keep a 14-day immutability program running on all customer backups,” Craig says. “I can’t articulate how important the immutability feature has been as a service provider selling data storage services.”

One of Somerville’s customers recently faced a situation where a hacker managed to lock all of their on-prem data. Thanks to Scality, Craig and his team were able to recover all 19 of their servers within a single weekend.
“Without immutability, chances are the customer would have lost all their data,” Craig says.

“Scality allowed us to restore that data off the Scality platform quickly, and then back into production with as minimal a time frame as possible…Life would’ve been vastly different for the customer if we didn’t have the Scality platform sitting underneath their backups.”

And finally, without access and egress fees, Scality also allows Somerville to compete with hyperscalers like AWS, giving their Australian customers an affordable alternative to the public cloud that keeps their data in-country.

“Data sovereignty is a big issue. Now we have the ability to compete with AWS in terms of scale, size, and price point,” Craig says. “We can deliver the Scality platform in their network so there are no ingress and egress costs.”

Results

Faster customer onboarding

with seamless scalability

~30% TCO savings

and strong revenue growth in their data protection business

Peace of mind

that customer data is immutable and ransomware-proof

Worry-free restoration of customer data

19 servers in a single weekend

More business and greater peace of mind at lower cost

With Scality object storage, Somerville has seen strong growth in their data protection business, while at the same time achieving savings of around 30%.

“The migration onto the Scality platform enabled us to scale our data protection business and, as a result, grow our client base,” Craig says. “It also allowed us to streamline the backend of the business, so we could decrease the cost of operating and maintaining the platform.”

In the past year, Scality has helped Somerville save valuable customer data on several occasions:

“Data loss for any organization is a disaster. And there have been a number of occasions in the last 12 months where being able to rely on Scality has been really valuable for us,” Craig says. “Not only from a cyber attack perspective, but also when customers had an equipment failure and lost a number of servers. The ability to restore that data quickly and efficiently is absolutely the value proposition that Scality offers.”

All enterprises and managed service providers need a partner like Scality, Craig concludes:

“For every MSP holding data on behalf of customers — and even the CIO of an enterprise organization whose responsibility is to ensure that they protect the organization’s data — Scality’s immutability features and resilience features are absolutely critical.”