Icelandic IT service provider Thekking has selected Cohesity to considerably simplify its customer data protection and improve its Service Level Agreement (SLA) and competitive offering. The Cohesity C2500 system provides data protection and disaster recovery services across two data centre locations in Iceland for their large VMware environments. The additional IOPs and compute power of the Cohesity nodes have helped Thekking to better utilise key Veeam features such as Instant VM Recovery and Virtual Lab. This announcement follows Cohesity’s strategy to expand its offering across northern Europe.
Founded in 1999, Thekking is the leading native player in hosting and services in Iceland, with approximately 70 employees based in two locations in the northern part of the country (Akureyri) and in the capital region (Kopavogur). In addition to Cohesity, the SP’s infrastructure features both Cisco and NetApp’s FlexPod at the two datacentre sites. Thekking supports a large VMware environment as well as physical hosts and its customers can leverage one site, or choose to utilise a dual-site strategy if they require redundancy. Following the installation of the Cohesity C2500, the company has the ability to offer best of breed technology to its customers and to rely on it for its own hosting platform. But as the business grew, the storage requirements at both sites had to be scaled up. The main challenge for Thekking was to find a solution that would improve deduplication rates beyond what was provided by the existing Veeam solution and do so within the boundaries of the budget constraints.
Recognising Cohesity’s ability to provide an infinitely scalable platform at an affordable price, Thekking chose Cohesity’s secondary storage after considering several deduplication appliances that were evaluated based on their ability to easily scale and their simplicity of operation.
“When looking at deduplication appliances Cohesity stood out because of the clear benefit of a simple scale-out design, where compute power behind the deduplication process would scale linearly when adding storage nodes,” Thekking Infrastructure Architect Marteinn Sigur?sson explained. “Having previous experience with other brands in this space such as Data Domain, where most of the times the controller’s compute power did not scale with the added storage capacity, it was an obvious improvement for us that the Cohesity architecture was based on hyperconverged nodes composed of both compute and storage,” he added.
A proof of concept allowed Thekking to thoroughly vet the Cohesity technology. Ease of setup, system stability, and instant node expansion of the cluster were key operational requirements validated by the customer. Technological criteria of setting up Veeam copy jobs to a Network File System (NFS) mount point were accomplished in a matter of minutes and within an hour the first copy jobs were running. Finally, the deduplication was monitored to ensure that the storage efficiency achieved would allow for a solid business case, which was critical for the Thekking management.
The technology validation was a tremendous success. “Our conclusion after the POC was that it was a perfect fit for our needs and the investment was justified mainly because of the deduplication rate achieved” explained Marteinn. “After just a few copy jobs, the deduplication increased by 3x, and never stopped improving. Since it was global deduplication, it provided more efficient and simple storage than the Veeam software deduplication at the main site,” he concluded.
Cohesity is now the sole secondary storage provider at Thekking’s Akureyri site. As the business grows, Thekking administrators can easily expand the Cohesity cluster on demand, rather than having to pre-purchase storage ahead of time, with spare capacity sitting idle. Cohesity’s global deduplication and pay-as-you-grow model delivers far greater efficiency to Thekking.
