MR Datentechnik Launches a New Data Storage Service Built on Quantum ActiveScale Object Storage

Headquartered in the German state of Bavaria, MR Datentechnik offers a full range of IT solutions and managed services. Organisations engage the company for everything from infrastructure deployment and systems integration to digitisation initiatives and fully outsourced IT management.

Recently, the leadership team at MR Datentechnik decided to launch a new storage service to support customers’ needs to preserve and protect fast-growing data volumes. The service, which would be designed for online storage of object data, could be used for backup and recovery, archiving, and data security. This online service would enable organisations to retrieve data rapidly—anytime, from anywhere.

Creating an S3-compatible service was a top priority. The MR Datentechnik team wanted to support S3 applications and workflows and facilitate integration with S3 cloud storage environments.

For the service’s launch, the MR Datentechnik team decided to focus first on the backup use case. As a result, the underlying storage platform for the service had to integrate seamlessly with the latest version of Veeam Backup & Replication.

Building a New Storage Service on Quantum ActiveScale In designing the new service, MR Datentechnik team explored numerous storage solutions, including solutions from several leading public cloud providers. Ultimately, the team selected Quantum ActiveScale object storage. Quantum ActiveScale is S3 compatible, which allows MR Datentechnik’s clients to use the storage service with S3-enabled apps and workflows. For example, using this service based on ActiveScale, organisations can easily replicate data to S3 cloud storage environments. “Quantum ActiveScale provides the reliable, highly scalable S3-compatible object storage we needed for building our new storage service,” says Jochen Kraus, Managing Director. “The platform is stable even under high loads, and it offers sophisticated software that is extremely useful for our multi-tenant environment.” Seamlessly Integrating with Veeam Backup & Replication

Quantum ActiveScale provides tight integration with Veeam Backup & Replication—the industry-leading backup, recovery, and data security solution for on-premises and cloud workloads. ActiveScale is part of a comprehensive portfolio of Quantum Veeam Ready products, which also includes Quantum flash storage, backup appliances, and tape storage solutions.

ActiveScale is fully qualified as a Veeam Ready Object Repository with Immutability. This designation reflects ActiveScale’s ability not only to act as a backup repository, but also provide outstanding ransomware protection with immutable Veeam backups based on ActiveScale’s object locking feature. ActiveScale also now supports integrated space reporting using the Veeam Smart Object API (SOSAPI) simple monitoring of Veeam storage usage.

With ActiveScale as the foundation for their new storage service, the MR Datentechnik team—and its clients—can take advantage of the powerful new capabilities of Veeam Backup & Replication version 12. For example, Veeam v12 introduces direct-to–object storage capabilities, enabling ActiveScale to act as a standalone repository as well as a primary backup repository in the Veeam Performance tier. This eliminates the need to copy production data to an intermediary system before moving it to ActiveScale. This capability helps MR Datentechnik offer a faster, simpler, and more cost-effective service to customers.

Also, with Veeam v12, MR Datentechnik’s service provides an ideal target for backing up NAS devices and file shares. Veeam v12 optimises performance with metadata caching, thus reducing overall data transfer requirements when backing up to the MR Datentechnik storage cloud.

Accelerating Customer Onboarding—and Achieving Growth Targets Early

Building on ActiveScale has helped MR Datentechnik to drive swift growth for the new storage service. “Thanks to ActiveScale’s ability to automate the onboarding process, we can onboard customers in under a day,” says Kraus. “With that fast onboarding, we’ve been able to add customers to this service much more quickly than we anticipated. We have reached our two-year growth target goals in less than a year.”

In addition to protecting customer environments, MR Datentechnik’s internal teams are also benefiting from the new service by employing it as a backup target for their own internal IT systems and other managed services infrastructure.

Simplifying Expansion with Easy Scalability from Quantum As MR Datentechnik continues to add customers, the company can scale its ActiveScale-based service easily and without disruption. ActiveScale enables MR Datentechnik to scale compute, networking, and storage resources to support billions of objects and exabytes of capacity for their own disaster recovery and backup needs, as well as for their S3 Service offerings to their customers. The platform’s Dynamic Data Placement feature automatically optimises placement of objects across resources, eliminating the need for manual rebalancing. Capacity on demand software licensing and seamless, non-disruptive expansion give MR Datentechnik flexibility to accommodate the company’s precise needs, incrementally, without large-scale overhauls.

“The simple scalability of ActiveScale means we can continue to onboard new customers and provide those customers with a rapidly expandable service,” says Kraus.

Maximising Storage Resiliency for an Always-On Service

Managed service providers need to build their offerings on reliable, resilient platforms to reduce any possibility of customer downtime. ActiveScale’s rolling system upgrade capability and erasure coded data durability help MR Datentechnik deliver an always-on service that can tolerate component and site failures without jeopardising availability.

Streamlining Storage Management and Controlling Complexity To provide a fully managed service as economically as possible, MR Datentechnik needed a storage platform that could minimise administrative complexity. The ActiveScale web-based interface helps simplify management of accounts, users, access keys, health monitoring, capacity, performance, and more.

Plus, the platform’s DevOps features enable easy integration. “ActiveScale offers extensive options for connecting to our existing management infrastructure—including through RESTful APIs, a command-line interface, SSH, and Prometheus-based metrics, monitoring, and alerting,” says Kraus. For backup services, the MR Datentechnik can take a fully integrated approach to administration. “With the close integration of ActiveScale and Veeam, we can handle every aspect of the managed backup service efficiently—from implementation to onboarding to ongoing management of customer environments,” says Kraus.

Gaining the Flexibility for Additional Use Cases MR Datentechnik continues to onboard new customers who are using the storage service for back up with Veeam Backup & Replication. But at the same time, the company’s leadership team envisions additional use cases for the service. “With S3 compatibility, we can expand the storage service to other workflows,” says Kraus. “By building on Quantum ActiveScale, we have a very flexible platform for meeting a broad spectrum of customer needs.”

“With the close integration of ActiveScale and Veeam, we can handle every aspect of the managed backup service efficiently— from implementation to onboarding to ongoing management of customer environments.”