How Object First Ended Waident's 10-Year Hunt for Immutable Onsite Backup Storage?

By Rich Freeman, chief content officer, channel analyst, journalist, Channel Mastered, Inc.

In my experience, you can learn a lot about a company and its products by talking with its management.

There are some things, however, that only talking with a partner will teach you. I’ve spoken with the senior leadership of Object First (US) Inc. about its one and only solution, an immutable storage appliance for Veeam backups called Ootbi, several times.

John Quinn, principal at Chicago-based Waident Technology Solutions, a SOC 2 cybersecurity and IT MSP that focuses on support, security, strategy, and secure cloud, is the first Object First partner I’ve had the chance to meet. Hearing the backstory on how Ootbi helped Waident fill a critical need in its backup strategy reinforces just how rare systems like Ootbi are and just how big a difference finding one backed by a channel-only vendor can make for a VAR or MSP and its customers alike.

Scary Situation
Founded some 20 years ago, Waident has customers with as few as a dozen employees and as many as several thousand in a range of vertical industries. The company uses Veeam software to protect about 98% of those clients from data loss.

Waident stores more than 2.5 PB of backups at 2 offsite facilities in USA and another in Europe. Immutability for that data was initially an add-on offered at extra cost.

“Now we’re just saying, ‘here’s your cost of backups with immutability.’ It’s not an option,” Quinn notes.

The reason why is no mystery to anyone familiar with the savage toll ransomware has taken on businesses in recent years. “Attackers will compromise the domain and then go for the backups so you can’t restore,” Quinn says. “It’s just scary.“

Immutable offsite backup storage is an essential part of a strategy for sparing customers that fate, but having an onsite equivalent is equally important to ensure rapid recovery in the event of data loss or encryption. Finding the right solution for that need, though, turned out to be a long process for Quinn and his team. Like, really long.

“We evaluated probably 8 to 10 products over 10 years,” he recalls.

Some were hardware-based, others software-based, but all were designed to address multiple use cases and a variety of storage functions. That seeming flexibility resulted in complexity and compromises Quinn wasn’t willing to make. While those solutions addressed many needs, data protection wasn’t their strong suit.

“They tried to solve too many problems,” he says. “The NAS devices many other solution providers used for local backup storage, meanwhile, had issues of their own. Those are a single point of failure and they’re not easy to chain together when you need to add capacity“

He wanted a simpler, more scalable purpose-built solution with reliability. Needless to say, any solution he chose would have to make tampering with backups all but impossible too. “

Immutability was a requirement,” he says.

Immutability by default
He discovered Ootbi shortly after its launch. Right away, he could see how many of the items on his checklist it satisfied, starting with reliability and scalability. The appliance features dual power supplies and a RAID-6 disk array with a hot spare, for example, and users can cluster up to 4x64TB or 128TB nodes. That supports many of Waident’s clients, which means no fork lift upgrades when someone needs more capacity.

“They can implement 20 new VMs tomorrow and start backing up to us and they’re never going to fill up their repository,” Quinn says. Performance, which can reach up to 4.0 GB /s, scales linearly every time you add a node too.

Better yet, immutability is present by default the moment you install the device. Ootbi, in fact, is an acronym for “out of the box immutability.” A purpose-built backup target appliance designed to integrate with Veeam’s direct-toobject storage configuration, it supplements a factory-hardened operating system with 53 Object Lock technology to provide a WORM repository that no one, including administrators with root access, can change.

“Ootbi, moreover, was designed to do precisely one thing really well by people who appreciate the power of simplicity, so while architecting a Veeam backup environment takes effort,” Quinn notes. “protecting Veeam backups with Ootbi doesn’t. We just slot it in and point Veeam to it.“

“Pretty simple. The system rarely needs attention once it’s up and running either. We don’t have to get in and do anything for a lot of those customers,” he says.

From a more pragmatic standpoint, bundling immutable backup storage with Ootbi into Veeam solutions increases the size of every Veeam deal Waident closes, while helping the company cement its reputation with clients as an IT authority rather than garden-variety reseller

“To talk about how we have a specific platform that is integrated with Veeam and helps them protect their data with immutability strengthens the discussion,” Quinn says.

Commitment to Partners
I’ve written before about how seriously Object First takes partner relationships and its channel-only business model. That’s a commitment brought to the company by its founders, Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov, who also co-founded Veeam, a vendor famous for its devoted partner community. Quinn became interested in Object First when he discovered who founded it.

“I was so happy to hear that Ratmir and Andrei were behind the company,” he says. “I knew they were going to make a solid product because they knew how to read and write Veeam. They wrote the software,” he says. They also have a proven track record of building businesses to last.“

“It was not going to be something that was going to get acquired in a year, year and a half,” Quinn says.

Like Veeam, he adds: “Object First is an easy vendor for partners to work with. High quality support is readily available, and processes like registering deals and placing orders are simple and clear. I understand what my costs are for the box and the maintenance, and what my margin is.”

The company is responsive to partner feedback about anything it can do better as well.

“They’re really listening to us,” Quinn says

To date, Waident has purchased and sold 6 Ootbi appliances in the first half of the year for internal use and for clients. Quinn foresees adding a lot more units to that early tally.

“Ootbi provides us an affordable solution that’s easy to implement and maintain, that allows us to protect our customers and our own data with immutability, and that allows me to sleep better at night,” he says.

There’s nothing so unique about Waident to suggest it’s the only Veeam partner out there that can increase deal size, impress customers, and better protect data with Ootbi’s help. The best way to find out if you’re another one is to contact Object First.

Business Challenge
Waident needed a local, appliance-based immutable storage repository for Veeam backups to add a critical layer of protection to its existing cloud-based storage. A decade of fruitless searching, however, failed to turn up a product with the ease of use, reliability, scalability, and above all security Waident demanded.

Results:

Object First’s Ootbi gives Waident the immutable onsite backup storage it needs without imposing deployment and management burdens or creating capacity planning headaches .
Object First delivers a highly available object storage clustered solution that is simple to deploy and maintain.
Including Ootbi in Veeam solutions expands deal size while adding extra protection from ransomware.
Explaining Ootbi’s role in Veeam solutions helps Waident showcase its differentiating strategic know-how as well.

Case study: How Object First Ended Waident’s 10-Year Hunt for Immutable Onsite Backup Storage