DC BLOX is a multi-tenant data center provider in the Southeast delivering the infrastructure and connectivity essential to power today's digital business.
As DC BLOX has grown, opportunities have surfaced to provide high-performance and affordable secondary storage services to more local areas in the Southeast. To do this, a new approach was required. The platform needed to perform, scale seamlessly, leverage many geographic regions, give the end user the ability to specify where the data should be located, and support both traditional and cloud-native applications. These requirements not only would allow DC BLOX to have a solution that addresses customer needs, but also give them unique differentiators against global public cloud services.
Since they already had an existing storage service, it also would be a big bonus if the next-generation platform could repurpose and utilize the hardware infrastructure in place. If this could be possible, they preferred to scale with standard, off-the-shelf hardware to ensure costs are always optimized.
The team at DC BLOX evaluated multiple object and file storage solutions and decided to build this next-generation storage service using SwiftStack.
SwiftStack is the object and file storage platform that powers DC BLOX Cloud Storage. This is a multi-region cloud storage service that provides DC BLOX’s customers with a turn-key hyper-scale storage solution that supports a variety of business continuity and disaster recovery scenarios.
The initial SwiftStack cluster was built using repurposed hardware that was well-suited for the use case, which would not have been possible with most other storage platforms.“Repurposing existing servers allowed us to save because we didn't have to buy new hardware for one of our initial deployments.” said Chris Gatch, CTO at DC BLOX. The cluster is initially distributed across Atlanta, Chattanooga, and Huntsville regions and can easily scale to future locations as they are built out.
SwiftStack’s multi-region capabilities allow for data to be durably stored in, and accessed from, any region, while giving operators and end users full control over where data is placed. In SwiftStack, storage policies can be applied on a bucket level to handle each set of data uniquely. For example, one application could have its data stored just in Atlanta, while another application can have its data exclusively stored in Huntsville and Birmingham. For data protection scenarios, it gives customers a lot of confidence around the durability and availability of their data when they know where it is stored.
Unlike most cloud storage services, DC BLOX is able to offer object API (S3, Swift) and file protocol (SMB, NFS) access to the same sets of data. This gives customers much broader application compatibility with cloud storage than what is available from the big public cloud vendors. This functionality is enabled by SwiftStack’s new open cloud file system technology called ProxyFS.
For more information on SwiftStack’s features, support, pricing and product documentation, contact us.
“Re-purposing existing servers…allowed us to save because we didn't have to buy new hardware for one of our initial deployments. The technical support is good. I would rate it as a nine out of ten.”
“Re-purposing existing servers…allowed us to save because we didn't have to buy new hardware for one of our initial deployments. The technical support is good. I would rate it as a nine out of ten.”
“It's one less thing I have to stress about because it's extremely solid, easy to use for the entire team, and the performance is outstanding.”
“SwiftStack provides our business with an array of solutions to storage challenges, which helps me sleep a lot better at night. And I value that we can do server maintenance during the day without customer impact.”
“SwiftStack cut our storage management overhead for backup by over 90%...the entire process took only an hour and a half."
“SwiftStack is a “single source of truth” for our data. Our infrastructure team can manage data placement based on policies to optimize workflows without application developers or researchers even knowing changes have occurred.”
