Cloudian - says 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 environment.
The Spark NZ-owned CCL has expanded in recent years through customer growth and a number of mergers and acquisitions, including a merger with Revera last year and now says it has more than 1,000 clients and 650 staff across New Zealand.
According to Cloudian - officially launched in New Zealand and Australia in July - CCL was seeking an object storage provider, seeing the technology as a “pivotal stepping stone 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 at CCL.
CCL points out that also factoring into its “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 - and recognising how digital and data-driven innovation can help revitalise 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 said.
“We needed a specialist object storage provider, rather than a company that just offers it, to meet current and future ICT demand.
“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.”
According to Hansen, in the short time since deploying the Cloudian solution, CCL has already benefited from a five-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 high-performance storage, increasing efficiency and further lowering costs. In addition, HyperStore’s fully native S3 API enables CCL to easily move data between public and private cloud environments as hybrid cloud becomes the model of choice in New Zealand.”
“According to IDC, object storage capacity shipments are expected to increase at a 40% compound annual growth rate from 2020 to 2024*,” said James Wright, regional director A/NZ and Oceania, at 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.”
