Delivering modern data protection with cloud scale backup from Cobalt Iron and IBM
Company Size
200-1,000
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- IBM Spectrum Protect
- IBM Spectrum Storage
- Cobalt Iron ADP v3.2
Tech Stack
- Cloud Computing
- Data Protection
- Backup Solutions
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
Based near Kansas City, Cobalt Iron has over 20 years’ experience with IBM® Spectrum Storage™ technologies. As a leading developer of cloud scale data protection solutions, Cobalt Iron has worked with IBM for three years to create and support its own software-defined enterprise cloud backup solution. The company has been IBM Spectrum Protect experts for more than 20 years. Cobalt Iron developed a hybrid cloud approach to data protection using IBM Spectrum Protect as a core embedded application.
The Challenge
Organizations are struggling to modernize their legacy data protection environments in the face of growing demands around new infrastructure, new applications, and budget consolidation. Virtualization and modern application development processes have significantly outgrown legacy backup architectures. In response, infrastructure teams have created multiple backup solution types to handle the varying SLAs (performance, scale, cost) required by their business sponsors. However, the sheer number and variety of solutions in this uncontrolled expansion creates huge amounts of work, threatening to overwhelm the IT team in many organizations. Today, developers may add new applications and virtual server instances by the hundreds per day without accounting for the restrictions of the existing backup infrastructure. They leverage the cloud for immediate compute and storage resources, yet rarely communicate succinctly with corporate IT to ensure that the appropriate data protection services are in place.
The Solution
Cobalt Iron uses IBM Spectrum Protect to run millions of monthly backup jobs with up to 99.9 percent success rates—helping support rapid growth in customer backups at highly economical pricing. IBM Spectrum Protect is a key component of Cobalt Iron backup solutions. Spectrum Protect enables Cobalt Iron software-defined backup to protect practically any environment—including Microsoft Windows, IBM AIX® and Linux—either from physical machines or virtualization platforms such as VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V. The Cobalt Iron solution delivers two distinct layers of backup capabilities. The first is the management layer, which delivers a clear view of all data protection policies, activities, operations, scheduling, and reporting. The management layer also delivers on-going updates, upgrades, monitoring, and analytics. The second layer, Performance & Scale, delivers the engine for enterprise backup and recovery acceleration, and provides a bridge to cloud architecture and economics.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Darwin Ecosystem: Accelerating discovery and insight through cutting-edge big data and cognitive technologies
Darwin Ecosystem was founded with a unique vision of harnessing chaos theory mathematics to uncover previously hidden connections in unstructured data. The company’s algorithms can look at all the data generated by any source (such as news, RSS feeds and Twitter), and analyze how a specific set of concepts within that data are evolving over time. This is particularly valuable in situations such as business and competitive intelligence, social research, brand monitoring, legal discovery, risk mitigation and even law enforcement. A common problem in these areas is that a regular web search will only turn up the all-time most popular answers to a given question – but what the expert researcher is actually interested in is the moment-tomoment evolution of the data available on that topic. Darwin’s algorithm is computationally intensive, and the sources of data it correlates can be vast. To bring its benefits to a larger commercial audience, Darwin needed to find a way to make it scale.
Case Study
Zend accelerates, simplifies PHP development
Zend Technologies, a major contributor to the PHP open source community, needed to keep pace with emerging trends such as mobility, agile development, application lifecycle management and continuous delivery. The company needed to provide the right tools to the worldwide community of PHP developers. The challenge was to support enterprise-class capabilities from end to end, including mobile, compliance and security. The pace of business required developers to show results fast across a variety of devices without compromising quality or security.
Case Study
Achieving near limitless scalability and flexibility with data in the cloud
Web-based publishing platform SpaceCraft found that as its client base grew, it was spending an increasing amount of time managing its databases, distracting its focus from product innovation. As its user base rapidly expanded, data volumes at SpaceCraft began to rise dramatically. Along with their main focus on maintaining and further developing a great platform for web publishing, the SpaceCraft team had the added pressure of managing the increasing quantities of data while ensuring ongoing high performance for clients.
Case Study
nViso SA – Delivers emotion recognition solutions worldwide with a scalable SoftLayer hosting solution
nViso SA, a company that provides emotion recognition solutions, was in need of a high-performance cloud hosting infrastructure. The company wanted to extend its services to a global customer base. The challenge was to find a solution that could handle the demands of their growing customer base and the need for high performance and reliability.
Case Study
Infosys achieves a 5–7 percent effort reduction across projects
Infosys, a global leader in consulting, technology, and outsourcing solutions, was facing significant challenges in application development and maintenance due to its distributed teams, changing business priorities and the need to stay in alignment with customer needs. The company used a mix of open source, home-grown and third-party applications to support application development projects. However, challenges resulting from distributed teams using manual processes increased as the company grew. It became more and more important for Infosys to execute its projects efficiently, so they could improve quality, reduce defects and minimize delays.
Case Study
Inventive Launches crowd-sourcing portal to support equitable online collaboration
Inventive, a company committed to equitable, collaborative innovation, was looking to launch its fair-trade crowdsourcing portal. For this, it needed a flexible, cost-effective development platform and high-performance cloud hosting infrastructure. The company needed to ensure that the infrastructure was scalable to continue extending its portal solution as needed. The platform also needed to offer on-demand development capabilities to agilely support new projects.
