Quantum ActiveScale Speeds Backups for Managed Hybrid Cloud Provider Boreus

Organizations in publishing, healthcare, e-commerce, and tourism trust Boreus to manage systems that hold their critical data. To help protect that data from loss and improve business continuity, Boreus offers optional backup and restore services, using a Commvault solution for orchestration.

Until recently, the Commvault MediaAgents were connected to direct-attached storage, but the Boreus team needed to make a change as the direct-attached storage systems reached their capacity limits. “It was taking longer to complete backups and restores,” Thomas Sobirei, storage and data protection engineer at Boreus. “We needed a scalable solution that could speed up those processes.”

Simplifying management was another key goal. “Managing direct-attached storage systems with multiple file systems was too complicated,” says Sobirei. “We wanted to simplify management of our backup storage so our team could focus on other tasks.”

Discovering the Advantages of Object Storage
When examining both network-attached storage (NAS) solutions and object storage, the Boreus team found some important differences. “Object storage is much more cost-effective than NAS,” says Sobirei. “For example, ActiveScale was about 25% less than competing NAS solutions.” Object storage systems also offered simpler management. “We knew that the right object storage solution would be much easier than NAS to integrate with the Commvault system,” says Sobirei.

Selecting ActiveScale Object Storage for Backup Services
As the Boreus team explored new solutions, Quantum ActiveScale stood out among the pack. “We evaluated several object storage solutions, but Quantum ActiveScale was the only one that offered replication to S3 storage systems like AWS,” says Sobirei. “That capability provides us with the flexibility to support S3-enabled apps and workflows.” Straightforward implementation was another advantage. Installation took only a half hour. “It was very simple to get it up and running,” says Sobirei.

Reducing Needed Storage Capacity, Accelerating Backups
By using Commvault deduplication in conjunction with ActiveScale, Boreus has significantly reduced the storage capacity required to support its customers. “Now that we’re using deduplication, we have reduced the storage capacity we need by 60 percent,” says Sobirei.

Using ActiveScale with Commvault also helps accelerate nightly backups. “Because we’re writing less data, we can do much faster backups—and more frequent backups—than before,” says Sobirei.

Enhancing Storage Visibility and Improving Planning
The Boreus team is taking advantage of ActiveScale Cloud Management (CM) to monitor storage systems, track historical trends, and check service-level agreement metrics. Those storage insights help with planning. “With ActiveScale, we know when we’ll need to add capacity—that’s insight we didn’t have before,” says Sobirei.

Simplifying Ongoing Backup Infrastructure Management
ActiveScale has dramatically simplified backup storage administration, eliminating the complexity of the previous environment. “We spend zero time managing ActiveScale,” says Sobirei. “We installed it, created S3 buckets, presented those buckets to Commvault, and that was it. There’s really no management needed with ActiveScale—and that’s what we wanted.”