CBTS Meets Customer Demand for Agile and Cost-Effective Cloud Services With Hitachi EverFlex

Challenge

Meeting customer demand for cloud-based services

The move to cloud is transforming IT. As legacy infrastructure reaches end of life, it is rapidly being replaced with cloud solutions and utility-based consumption models that avoid the need for capital investment.

CBTS helps its customers achieve their business and IT goals with solutions that align to their cloud-first strategies. The company started out as a division of a local telephony company, but has evolved over the last 20 years. It is now an innovative IT managed service provider and an expert in cloud solutions. CBTS has 1,500 employees at locations in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland and India, and works with more than 3,000 organizations across multiple industries.

“Customers don’t want to manage their own datacenters or refresh IT infastructure anymore – they just want to know that their workloads are running,” comments Bill Ehrman, Senior Manager, Data Storage, at CBTS. “The move to cloud is one of the biggest trends we have seen in IT over the last 20 years. Our goal is to help our customer meet their cloud objectives, while addressing the ongoing challenges of security, exponential data growth and diminishing budgets.”

To meet demand for cloud-based services, CBTS needs flexible and reliable IT infrastructure. But like its customers, CBTS wants to avoid capital investment in infrastructure that might become redundant if customers scale-down. “We don’t always have visibility of our customers’ future plans, so we cannot predict their infrastructure requirements,” explains Ehrman. “As a result, it can be very hard to balance acquisition costs with customer needs.”

Solution

Flexible, reliable, cost-effective storage

To address this issue, CBTS asked its vendors for utility-based infrastructure sourcing options. After talking to a number of leading suppliers, CBTS partnered with Hitachi Vantara in 2010. “Utility pricing was not a common request at the time, but Hitachi Vantara offered us a true utility-based program,” comments Ehrman.

Today, CBTS still uses EverFlex from Hitachi to source around 20 Petabytes of storage on a utility-pricing basis. This includes Hitachi VSP (Virtual Storage Platform), H-NAS (network attached storage) and HCP (Hitachi Content Platform) for Cloud Scale.

With Hitachi EverFlex, CBTS can segregate domains for customers, which means the company can match clients to hardware on one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-one basis. This enables the company to provide the infrastructure to customers in a variety of forms – from highly secure private cloud environments to shared public cloud. EverFlex storage also supports CBTS’s cloud-based services such as hosted communications, Backup as a Service and DR as a Service. “Our customers include organizations in the medical, pharmaceutical, government and education sectors, where security is paramount,” says Ehrman. “With Hitachi EverFlex we can accommodate even the highest security requirements to adhere to HIPAA and FDA regulations without massively increasing prices.”

Outcome

Accelerating digital transformations with agile, cost-effective storage

CBTS can now meet customer demands for agile cloud-based services. “With Hitachi EverFlex, we can quickly scale up storage when a customer needs it, or scale down when they don’t,” says Ehrman. “So we’re not paying for infrastructure that is not being used.”

For example, thanks to the agility offered by EverFlex, CBTS can easily set up an additional 100 terabytes for a customer within three weeks, including onsite configuration. This task could take months if the infrastructure was sourced in the traditional manner. Plus, a linear cost structure provides CBTS with complete financial transparency, which can be passed on to its customers.

“EverFlex provides exceptional reliability, so we can deliver a white glove service for our customers,” concludes Ehrman. “With flexibile, secure and cost-effective storage, we can help our customers accelerate their digital transformations and boost our competitive advantage.”