Redstor Partners with Exponential-e

Redstor Limited, a managed services, cloud storage and IT solutions provider, announced a partnership with Exponential-e Limited, the ‘smart wires’ provider of Ethernet services, application assurance and monitoring for the WAN, to enable low latency customer access to its data centres in Slough and Reading at sub-millisecond speeds.

The partnership comes as part of Redstor’s drive to maximise the EMC Atmos cloud storage platform and provide secure storage infrastructure services that will help customers manage and optimise external clouds. Exponential-e will allow Redstor to further develop this cloud offering by enabling customers to upload and download data at high speed from its data centres, delivering increased Input/Output operations per second (IOPS) for customers.

Redstor now has two data centres following its recent migration of primary storage facilities to the Equinix LD5 IBX data centre in Slough, which replicates to Redstor’s Reading based data centre. The Exponential-e network will support Redstor’s delivery of high availability storage services to support customer business continuity plans by offering faster bandwidth using the Exponential-e network to prioritise business traffic and filter out rogue traffic.

As part of the partnership Redstor has also gained its own IP network environment to allow it to provide an internal boarder gateway protocol (BGP), offering scalability of its IP network capabilities. The BGP also enables multihoming of the network to increase the reliability of the Internet connection for customers and enhance security across Redstor’s data centre ISPs.

This next generation of networks in Redstor’s cloud services offers customers a direct route to their data, bypassing public clouds. It means customers will see Redstor’s backup service as though it is attached to their LAN in a wide and stretched environment, meaning both the Equinix and Redstor data centres are accessed via the cloud but are linked via virtual private LAN services (VPLS) from Exponential-e.

Commenting on Exponential-e’s partnership with Redstor, Adrian Hobbins, Chief Technology Officer at Exponential-e said: "The use of Exponential-e’s smart-wired network means that as Redstor expands further into the cloud storage and backup arena, high performance public and private business grade connectivity is now available to all Redstor customers. We have also provided a network connecting Redstor’s data centres allowing the organisation to transparently balance its workload across the two sites by leveraging Exponential-e’s leading edge multi-point VPLS technology. This partnership highlights the need for organisations to address the capabilities of the networks they use to transfer information to data centres and to take advantage of today’s high speed Wide Area Ethernet technology."

Dominic Anschutz, Operations Manager at Redstor added: "We recognise that channel partnerships play a very strategic role in our drive to provide market leading and competitive cloud storage and backup services. EMC Atmos and Exponential-e form key parts of our cloud infrastructure and as a cloud provider it’s important for customers to connect to our services whenever they require with speed and reliability. Exponential-e eliminates any limitation by network suppliers and allows us to respond appropriately to the huge demand we have seen from customers wanting to move data to lower-cost storage locations easily and quickly."