The dominant themes of Computer Weekly’s top 10 stories on customer storage, backup and disaster recovery upgrades in 2022 are organisations that need more capacity, the ability to scale at will, flexibility and global access – and all at reduced cost in terms of energy and space.
So it’s no surprise that the cloud figures prominently, with companies such as Dr Marten’s ensuring data protection via cloud-to-cloud backup in a near-100% cloud infrastructure. Meanwhile, Imperial College NHS Trust saw big savings by moving backup and archive data to the cloud.
Elsewhere, follow-the-sun access to data – if not via public cloud as such – is often vitally important, and here we look at companies such as media organisation Jellyfish which transitioned to a global file system and cut energy costs too.
Where scale is also important, object storage has become increasingly prominent. Australia-based TV provider MediaHub ditched legacy SAN and NAS for object storage that saw it move to multiple tens of PB without the hardware issues that had plagued it previously.
And sometimes there’s simply the need to upgrade legacy SANs to contemporary equivalents, but equipped with space and cost-saving high performance media like NVMe flash, which was the case at the Scottish Crown prosecutor’s office.
1. Dr Martens goes feetfirst into cloud-to-cloud backup
Iconic bootmaker laces up for a strategy to move all applications to the cloud, beginning with cloud-to-cloud backup for Microsoft 365 apps plus on-site VMware operations.
2. NHS trust cuts costs and refresh cycle with Wasabi cloud storage
Imperial College NHS Trust expects to saves 30% in storage costs and cut back on five-year refresh headaches in a move that has seen backup and archive data move to the Wasabi cloud.
3. TV provider MediaHub boots SAN and NAS for Scality object storage
Sydney-based TV content provider MediaHub got tired of performance issues and scaling difficulties with SAN and NAS, so powered its as-a-service offer with Scality object storage.
4. Video effects firm cuts costs by 20% and goes hybrid with Hammerspace
Jellyfish Pictures saved on rising power and office space costs, as well as Brexit difficulties, by using Hammerspace to allow access to large files from any geographic location.
5. The verdict is Pure as Scottish prosecutor upgrades high-end storage
Scotland’s prosecution service saw disk drives in the dock every week with EMC legacy storage. Now it’s got Pure all-flash and has turned over an (Evergreen) new leaf.
6. Disaster recovery is an essential service for EDF with Phenix-IT
EDF has built disaster recovery tracking, planning and testing software on a six-month upgrade cycle based on governance, risk and compliance functionality in Mega’s Hopex platform.
7. Genome lab puts Vast Data’s rapid I/O to work on patient data
French government-backed SeqOIA ditched its Lustre-based storage after it reached performance limits and files got corrupted. That got fixed by a Vast Data QLC flash-based array.
8. Refrigeration firm freezes legacy backup for one Cohesity cluster
France-based Clauger had reached limits of capacity and complexity with multi-supplier legacy backup, so moved to one Cohesity cluster and gained restores that took mere minutes.
9. How Veeam helped grocery chain Franprix escape its backup hell
French supermarket chain had backup windows that ran well into the next working day and restoring deleted files could take days. It chose Veeam in a contest with Cohesity.
10. Hammers sign Acronis as backup and security in one
West Ham United set to replace separate backup from Veeam and a variety of security products with Acronis Cyber Protect to have backup, data protection and file share on a single platform.
