Advania Managed Services Elevates Cyber Resilience with the VAST Data Platform

Partnering with VAST Data for Unrivaled Data Protection

Industry Business Services

Use Case Data Protection

Overview

Advania Managed Services, an operating company of Advania, is using the VAST Data Platform to secure enterprise clients from cyber attacks and accelerate their backup and recovery operations at scale while radically simplifying data protection with lower costs. Advania is a leading IT provider in Scandinavia and the UK, offering various services, including consulting, managed services, and technology resale.

Preben Berg, CTO at Advania Managed Services, explains why they partnered with VAST Data to transform their backup and recovery offerings. “We are very good at adapting new technologies like VAST and bringing them to market in a consumable way for clients. VAST allows us to seamlessly bring benefits to clients – while ensuring that their critical data assets are safeguarded from malicious attacks, like ransomware, and they can recover very quickly to minimize disruptions.”

Background

Berg says VAST’s Data Platform aligns with several major industry trends that drove their decision - increased demand for managed services, the adoption of the S3 protocol, and the need for massive, simple scalability. “Being able to better deliver managed services at petabyte scale, seamlessly integrate with S3, with a platform that can cost-effectively grow to satisfy demanding enterprise workloads - those were the three main drivers for using VAST,” notes Berg.

Previously, Advania used an open-source software-defined storage solution consisting of hard disk drives. However, they ran into limitations with this approach at a multi-petabyte scale regarding manageability, performance, and cost. “Those technologies have come to their limit—they were not engineered for petabytes and billions of files in a large single namespace,” says Berg. “Using erasure coding in a petabyte-scale hard drive environment has huge operational overhead and high cost.”

Advania has dramatically simplified its backup and recovery infrastructure by migrating to the VAST Data Platform, resulting in greater efficiencies. Berg explains, “Before, we needed virtual servers to receive backup data from clients. That whole stack—hypervisors, block storage, VMs running Linux—can be reduced because now you can write directly to VAST using S3. This means we can remove servers and VMs, and the whole stack gets much simpler.”

The VAST Data Platform’s ability to scale capacity and performance linearly is impressive - it's one thing to see on a PowerPoint slide, but another to experience it in real life at scale. VAST delivers.

Preben Berg

CTO, Advania Managed Services

Outcome

The VAST Data Platform, with the innovative Disaggregated Shared Everything Architecture (DASE), allows users to scale the capacity of a VAST Cluster independently from the compute resources of the cluster. Benefits for Advania and its clients include:

Faster recoveries for improved cyber resilience: Advania can backup and restore data faster than ever before. “With data on the VAST Data Platform, we can now empower our customers to recover data very rapidly. Hard drives are good at receiving data but perform terribly for large restores,” notes Berg. He estimates recovery speeds have increased by at least 3X.
Lower costs with reduced data center footprint: Advania expects to reduce its data center footprint for backup data by 50-75% by consolidating to the VAST Data Platform. This also translates to significant savings for power and cooling.
Simplified operations and management at scale: The VAST Data Platform allows Advania to scale to exabytes while maintaining consistent performance and low operational overhead. “We can easily add 5, 10, 20 PB and beyond with VAST without significantly increasing the operational burden, which is not the case with other options,” says Berg.

Advania leverages VAST Data Platform for client backups, encompassing diverse datasets from VMs, databases, medical systems, and various enterprise workloads. Additionally, they utilize VAST’s efficient snapshot technology to further boost their data protection strategy. With support for Zero-Trust security features like immutable snapshots, encryption, multi-factor authentication, granular access controls, and intelligent threat detection capabilities, VAST enables Advania to meet security and regulatory requirements across all of their client industries.

Advania has deployed VAST Data Platform with its backup software partners, Veeam and Commvault. Berg says both products integrate well with VAST’s S3-compatible object storage protocol. “Veeam is our strategic choice and where most of our business is, and we also support Commvault. The combination of VAST’s S3 support and Veeam’s recent S3 integration is a powerful solution.”

Looking ahead, Advania views VAST as a flexible, future-proof data platform that can be extended to more unstructured workloads over time, like large-scale data lakes and AI/analytics use cases. “We see VAST as a very appealing platform for most workloads going forward,” says Berg. “The flexibility to adapt to changing customer requirements is extremely important to us.”

Berg is confident in the decision to use VAST. “The VAST Data Platform’s ability to scale capacity and performance linearly is impressive - it’s one thing to see on a PowerPoint slide, but another to experience it in real life at scale. VAST delivers.”