Scaling Flexible, Cost-Effective Cloud Backup Services with Hitachi EverFlex IaaS

Overview

Challenge

• Kramer & Crew wanted to offer its customers flexible, easily scalable, and highly cost-efficient protection against ransomware and other cyber threats.

Solution

• By choosing Hitachi EverFlex Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with Hitachi Content Platform implemented across its own two data centers, Kramer & Crew gained business agility.

Outcome

• Simplified scalability, supported by Hitachi, helps Kramer & Crew to focus on customer service and launch innovative Crew:Cloud™ solutions.

Challenge

At a time when cyber threats such as ransomware attacks are increasing, companies of all sizes are recognizing the importance of reliable backup and recovery solutions. In the past, serious cyber threats were mainly a risk for big brands and large international companies, but today criminals are actively targeting small and mid-sized businesses, too.

To help its clients protect their businesses against these threats, IT service provider Kramer & Crew wanted to expand its cloud and managed services and deliver more flexible and cost-efficient business continuity solutions for its customers.

With around 300 specialists across 9 offices in Germany and almost $116M (€100M) in annual revenues, Kramer & Crew offers a wide range of cloud and consulting services, combining an innovative spirit with 360° customer service. Strategically, Kramer & Crew aims to be an early adopter — always looking for the next technological advancements to stay ahead of the market and provide its customers with forward-looking solutions that create competitive advantage.

Kramer & Crew knew that traditional data protection tactics, such as managing off-site data backups with physical tapes, can be complex and expensive. The company wanted to develop a more tailored and cost-efficient offering for its customers.

Silvio Weber, Senior Consultant at Kramer & Crew, explains, “Our goal was to open a new chapter for our managed cloud services and deliver scalable storage with a more flexible cost structure. We wanted to make it easier and more cost-effective for all customers to modernize their backup processes. The key was to find a solution for highly reliable off-site backups that boost recovery speed and reduce the impact of cyber threats.”

Solution

As an IT service provider, Kramer & Crew knew what the market had to offer. Its experts had seen and used different solutions and appreciated the high availability and performance of Hitachi Vantara data infrastructure solutions. As a result, nine years ago, when the company first launched an S3-compatible object storage service under the Crew:Cloud™ brand, it selected Hitachi Content Platform (HCP). Following the success of Crew:Cloud™, Kramer & Crew developed additional offerings such as DR-as-a-Service for disaster recovery and Backup-as-a-Service which also use the HCP object store.

To keep up with growing demand for its cloud services and create even more cost-efficient offerings for its customers, Kramer & Crew decided to renew its object storage platform with a flexible and scalable Hitachi EverFlex Infrastructure as a Service solution with HCP. “We’ve elevated our services to the next level with Hitachi EverFlex and by becoming a Hitachi EverFlex Managed Service Provider,” explains Marco Poggioli, Principal Consultant Datacenter Services at Kramer & Crew. “The innovative pay-per-use model enables us to deliver more flexibility and scalability with compelling cloud economics.”

Working closely with Hitachi Vantara and distributor TD SYNNEX, Kramer & Crew implemented two fully redundant HCP solutions at its two data centers in Germany. With the systems being installed in different locations, Kramer & Crew can offer customers advanced georedundancy, while still maintaining local data residency in Germany.

The Hitachi solution allows Kramer & Crew to scale its services flexibly for specific customer workloads, installing additional compute nodes to boost performance or storage nodes to increase capacity. “With the HCP technology and Hitachi EverFlex, we are able to align our infrastructure and costs closely with our business needs,” confirms Silvio Weber. “It is a big benefit for us that we can also run different configurations at our two locations. Our customers may not be evenly distributed across the country, and not every customer needs full replication of their data.”

Outcome

Using HCP and Hitachi EverFlex, Kramer & Crew can offer its customers more comprehensive Crew:Cloud™ services for backup, compliance archives and cyber resiliency at more attractive, competitive and transparent prices. A huge advantage for Kramer & Crew is that scaling the solution is now managed by Hitachi, so the Kramer & Crew team can fully focus on customer service.

“We’re always looking for new, innovative datacenter solutions,” says Marco Poggioli. “That’s why we were one of the first partners in Europe to help our clients adopt Hitachi EverFlex and HCP. Now, Hitachi EverFlex has massively simplified scaling for our own object storage. We no longer need to spend time on monitoring, capacity planning, purchasing, deploying, and installing infrastructure. Everything is handled seamlessly and proactively by Hitachi. This makes us much more agile, and we can respond faster to customer requests, enabling more dynamic growth and quicker onboarding of new clients.”

Customers of the company’s Crew:Cloud™ backup services, which are built on Hitachi Data Protection Suite powered by Commvault, or other options, benefit from immutable remote backups while eliminating the costs and risks of traditional tape solutions. “Tapes are slow, and because the media can degrade over time, you can never be sure that the data you wrote can actually be read again later,” Weber explains. “By contrast, with our Crew:Cloud™ HCPaaS solution, we use HCP lock policies to provide write-once, read-many (WORM) protections. Customers can boost their business continuity and be certain that they can recover quickly. Building on this, we now also provide full disaster recovery as a service based on solutions from our technology partners Nutanix, Commvault and Veeam.”

Kramer & Crew customers, including healthcare providers and hospitals, can also leverage Hitachi EverFlex to facilitate compliance with regulations such as NIS2, boost digital sovereignty, and support local data residency.

Silvio Weber concludes, “Using Hitachi EverFlex, we deliver reliable, scalable and cost-efficient ransomware protection with flexible data retention policies, tailored to meet customer requirements. We’re excited to see that our customers are already using our agile object storage service for many more uses cases like document archives, data lakes, data lakehouses, and even next-generation file gateways.”