New Zealand Service Provider Computer Concepts Signs Multi-Million Dollar Deal With Cloudian

Cloudian, Inc. has signed a deal with Computer Concepts Ltd. (CCL) to provide object storage technology to CCL’s New Zealand customers through the vault managed service, with a particular focus on the government sector.

The multi-million dollar deal speaks to the growing role of object storage in managing and protecting data in the modern application workloads that are increasingly driving New Zealand’s digital agenda, particularly in hybrid cloud environments.

CCL is New Zealand’s largest locally focused information and communications technology (ICT) service provider.

The Spark NZ-owned company has expanded in recent years through customer growth and a number of mergers and acquisitions, including a merger with Revera last year. CCL has more than 1,000 clients and 650 staff across New Zealand. The company was seeking an object storage provider, seeing the technology as a pivotal steppingstone to help customers transition to hybrid cloud.

“With public cloud soaring and the expected local entry of CCL’s strategic partner, Microsoft, in the next few years, NZ’s ICT future is certain to be hybrid,” said Richard Hansen, director portfolio services, CCL.

Also factoring into CCL’s desire for a modern storage solution was a recent report from the New Zealand Government’s Digital Council, which was convened to guide the nation’s transformation to a post-Covid digital economy. Recognizing how digital and data-driven innovation can help revitalize hard-hit sectors of the economy, the report recommended public infrastructure projects be re-framed from being shovel-ready to being sensor-ready.

“We see object storage as essential to this sensor-ready focus as it is ideally matched to use cases such as videos, mobile apps, IoT and other areas central to where our technology needs are going,” Hansen added. “We needed a specialist object storage provider, rather than a company that just offers it, to meet current and future ICT demand.“

Cloudian was the solution to replace version one of Vault. CCL deployed a Cloudian HyperStore system with a storage capacity in excess of 5PB – the data equivalent of over 17 years of 24/7 full HD video recording.

“We particularly liked HyperStore’s scalability, performance, low TCO, and fully native compatibility with the S3 API-the widely adopted protocol of public cloud storage,” said Hansen.

In the short time since deploying the solution, CCL has benefited from a 5-fold performance improvement for data ingress and egress (inbound and outbound), while costs have decreased by an estimated 20%.

Cloudian has also decoupled CCL’s hardware and software, enabling it to distribute workloads strategically across commodity and storage, increasing efficiency and further lowering costs. In addition, HyperStore’s native S3 API enables CCL to move data between public and private cloud environments as hybrid cloud becomes the model of choice in New Zealand.

CCL has activated HyperStore in more than 100 customer environments to date, mostly focused on backup and recovery applications initially. Moving forward, the company plans to leverage Cloudian for additional use cases over time. This includes incorporating Cloudian’s Object Lock solution for ransomware protection, which is becoming an important security feature as cybercrime rises. Object Lock creates an immutable copy of backup data, making it invulnerable to hacker encryption and deletion and, thereby, enabling users to restore an uninfected copy of their data in the event of a ransomware attack.

The deal also leverages HPE’s storage infrastructure-as-a-service delivered under a GreenLake model, which provides a platform on which to run Cloudian’s technology.

“According to IDC, object storage capacity shipments are expected to increase at a 40% CAGR from 2020 to 2024¹,” said James Wright, regional director A/NZ and Oceania, Cloudian. “In New Zealand, object storage has emerged as one of the key drivers for hybrid cloud and data security-trends which have accelerated during the pandemic.  CCL is at the forefront in helping the country’s top government agencies and largest enterprises adapt to this new reality, and we’re proud to be partnering with CCL to bring the data management and protection benefits of object storage to these customers.“

Cloudian officially launched in New Zealand and Australia in July and announced the onboarding of a number of partners across the region in August.

¹ IDC Worldwide File- and Object-Based Storage Forecast, 2020-2024, June 2020, Doc. #US45992520.