Advania Managed Services Elevates Cyber Resilience with the VAST Data Platform

Partnering with VAST Data for Unrivaled Data Protection

Industry

Business Services

Use Case

Data Protection

Overview

Advania Managed Services, an operating company of Advania, is using the VAST Data Platform to secure enterprise clients from cyber attacks and accelerate their backup and recovery operations at scale while radically simplifying data protection with lower costs. Advania is a leading IT provider in Scandinavia and the UK, offering various services, including consulting, managed services, and technology resale.

Preben Berg, CTO at Advania Managed Services, explains why they partnered with VAST Data to transform their backup and recovery offerings. “We are very good at adapting new technologies like VAST and bringing them to market in a consumable way for clients. VAST allows us to seamlessly bring benefits to clients – while ensuring that their critical data assets are safeguarded from malicious attacks, like ransomware, and they can recover very quickly to minimize disruptions.”

Background

Berg says VAST’s Data Platform aligns with several major industry trends that drove their decision - increased demand for managed services, the adoption of the S3 protocol, and the need for massive, simple scalability. “Being able to better deliver managed services at petabyte scale, seamlessly integrate with S3, with a platform that can cost-effectively grow to satisfy demanding enterprise workloads - those were the three main drivers for using VAST,” notes Berg.

Previously, Advania used an open-source software-defined storage solution consisting of hard disk drives. However, they ran into limitations with this approach at a multi-petabyte scale regarding manageability, performance, and cost. “Those technologies have come to their limit—they were not engineered for petabytes and billions of files in a large single namespace,” says Berg. “Using erasure coding in a petabyte-scale hard drive environment has huge operational overhead and high cost.”

Advania has dramatically simplified its backup and recovery infrastructure by migrating to the VAST Data Platform, resulting in greater efficiencies. Berg explains, “Before, we needed virtual servers to receive backup data from clients. That whole stack—hypervisors, block storage, VMs running Linux—can be reduced because now you can write directly to VAST using S3. This means we can remove servers and VMs, and the whole stack gets much simpler.”