As a specialist in execution services and ranked at number 1 in the UK equity market, the client is dedicated to providing liquidity to a diverse customer network. Including institutional investors, retail brokers and asset managers, they deliver cost effective, flexible execution services from pre-trade through to settlement.

With a belief that technology-led innovation is a solid path to the development of their company, the client prides themselves on being customer-centric. They aim to provide flexible, high-quality services through innovation and a consistently reliable service.

 

  • Challenge
  • Solution
  • Outcome

Challenge

  • Moving the data centre

    The client intended to move out of its current London HQ in the next 18 months. With their primary data centre in its current HQ, the intention was to move the DC to a colocation (Co-Lo) facility as soon as possible.

  • Simplified protection

    As part of the overall DC move, the client wanted to refresh their data protection solution. Their current solution included CommVault Hyperscale data protection comprising of 3x Cisco UCS C-Series nodes per DC. The client had advised that the current solution was complex to configure and manage.

  • Innovation ready

    The legacy solution suffered from a lack of development, with the applications lacking optimal performance. Poor integration with the hardware led to slower restoration speeds and resiliency concerns.

  • Recovery speed

    The new solution needed to not only provide resiliency to protect against site failure, but it also needed to be able to complete a full back up within a 12 hour window.

Solution

With an existing long standing relationship, the client engaged with Natilik to understand what the best solutions on the market were. They quickly shortlisted Cohesity, FlashRecover and Rubrik.

With renowned expertise and accreditations in Data Centre design, deployment and support, Natilik captured the client’s technical requirements and proposed a new Pure Storage FlashRecover solution based on Pure Storage FlashBlade and Cohesity DataProtect technologies.

Pure Storage FlashRecover, powered by Cohesity, is an integrated modern all-flash data protection solution for rapid recovery at scale. The Pure Storage and Cohesity solution offers simple, fast, reliable, and independent scaling of storage and compute for backup and recovery of enterprise data. FlashRecover will be deployed into both data centres and leverage the data centre interconnect for replication.

The proposed design intended to provide a simplified solution with industry leading backup and restoration speeds to meet their business continuity requirements.

The solution needed to cater to these specific requirements:

• Standardise and simplify the process of data protection
• Provide resiliency to protect against a site failure
• The solution must have built-in resilience
• Restoration time is the key metric
• A full back up must be completed within a 12-hour window
• Optimise the use of cloud technologies for long-term retention
• Protect against ransomware attacks

Outcome

Natilik was awarded the business based upon the validation and assurance of performance provided. In this Client’s case, FlashRecover was capable of 6x the recovery speed of a hybrid solution which in itself are capable of 3-4x the recovery speed of nonhybrid solutions. Consistent performance when using ‘instant restore’ is also a feature. With FlashRecover, all the storage is flash providing a consistent read/write latency of 2-3ms even in an ‘instant mass restore’ of all workloads.

The security posture of the solution was extremely important. The solution designed ensures the Data protected by Cohesity is immutable. It is therefore immune to tampering or encryption. Unique to FlashRecover is Pure Storage’s SafeMode that requires at least two client personnel to contact and authenticate with Pure Storage support before data is deleted from a FlashBlade.

The client also benefited from Cohesity DataProtect, MegaFile that intelligently distributes files across all nodes by, if necessary, breaking large files into small chunks for parallel back-up and recovery across
all nodes.

Exceptional speed is achieved alongside the all-flash storage by Pure Storage’s FlashBlade for data protection as opposed to a hybrid configuration of flash and hard disk drives as in a native hyperconverged data protection solution.

  • Increased protection

    With an immutable solution with SafeMode built in the client can rest assured that their data is immune to tampering and deletion.

  • Cost saving

    Cohesity’s de-duplication algorithm results in less underlying storage being required to store the clients protected data. This is applicable both to the storage of the FlashBlades and in the public cloud resulting in less cost.

  • Value add to the client

    The client is now able to guarantee consistent performance when building test environments, or running data base consistency checks, by using clones or copies of their back-up data.