Switzerland's ISP senseLAN Innovates Data Protection and Slashes Backup Time to Minutes

Data Assets Need Immediate Protection

senseLAN is a leading ICT service provider in Switzerland that specializes in TV, radio, Internet, telephone, cloud, and server hosting, delivering high-quality services to 500 business customers and 10’000 households. It operates considerable core data assets, which if lost, will cause huge economic and reputational damage to the company. In the face of significant challenges, protecting these data assets epitomizes senseLAN's commitment to maintaining users' trust. The introduction of Huawei's OceanProtect backup storage appliance and the OceanStor Dorado all-flash NAS active-active solution takes senseLAN's storage solution to a new, higher level.

Innovation Paves the Way for Advance

The wave of digitalization has put the spotlight on data asset protection, and now users are looking for providers that not only provide data resilience and availability, but also deliver reliable services. As virtualization technologies became increasingly adopted and business grew, senseLAN's data center gradually deployed large-scale virtual machines in its virtual cluster. This was let down by the existing backup systems that were composed of outdated, low-performing general-purpose storage and servers, which could barely support mass data backup. What is more, the absent ransomware protection mechanism contributed to the lack of comprehensive data protection capabilities. Apart from data backup, building an efficient and reliable DR Data Recovery (DR) system is also the key to ensuring service continuity and data security. Currently, senseLAN deploys services in two data centers for disaster recovery. However, the previous NAS storage did use the active-passive high availability solution, which cannot implement service load balancing. The switchover also requires manual intervention.

Boosted by the Competent Storage, Huawei's OceanStor Dorado and OceanProtect Outperforms Expectations

Following a stage of technical analysis and market research, the IT team of senseLAN became aware of Huawei's OceanStor Dorado Storage and OceanProtect Appliance. OceanStor Dorado is designed to meet the major concerns of high availability, utilization, and usability for enterprises，offering huge storage capacity and quick data access. Based on OceanProtect Backup Storage, OceanProtect Appliance is an all-in-one solution that uses built-in backup software to provide comprehensive data protection capabilities, including backup, recovery, and ransomware protection.

Performance: Benefiting from the professional backup storage foundation, OceanProtect Appliance achieves end-to-end (E2E) I/O optimization for backup services, takes full advantage of hardware-software integration, and offers industry-leading bandwidth for backup and recovery. Moreover, the secure snapshot technology at the storage layer eliminates the need for backup servers, agents, and synthetic backup, cutting the backup time from hours to minutes and boosting backup efficiency. More significantly, the built-in file search engine of OceanProtect Appliance enables global file search and fine-grained recovery of a single file. This innovative function remarkably improves the efficiency and flexibility of data recovery. For senseLAN users, recovering a single file used to include complex operations and prolonged waiting. With OceanProtect Appliance, this process has been streamlined to just three simple steps. Faster service response has not only improved user satisfaction, but also won senseLAN more trust and respect from their customers.

Cost-effectiveness: The all-in-one design of OceanProtect Appliance slashes investment in backup software, server, and networking components, reduces occupied equipment room space, streamlines management, and improves O&M efficiency. It also boasts industry-leading data reduction capabilities, which can maximize backup space utilization and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Resilience: OceanProtect Appliance uses an exclusive dual-controller active-active architecture for redundancy. This architecture safeguards service continuity against interface module, controller, and disk failures, ensuring 99.9999% reliability. At the same time, it supports E2E ransomware protection by means of various features including ransomware detection for backup copies, secure snapshot, Write Once Read Many (WORM), and data encryption. These features protect copies from tampering, leakage, and ransomware attacks, ensuring high resilience and availability of copies.

As a production storage, OceanStor Dorado has the same system reliability. In addition, it supports the active-active mode of SAN+NAS integration. The two data centers back up each other and provide services simultaneously. When a device in a data center fails or even the entire data center fails, the services are automatically switched to the other data center. This not only provides users with higher data reliability and service continuity, but also improves the resource utilization of the storage system. The cooperation between senseLAN and Huawei has not only proved the technological advantages of Huawei's OceanStor Dorado and OceanProtect, but also generated new opportunities to innovate data protection technology. According to a senior executive of senseLAN, Huawei is a company that they trust and want to keep cooperation with. Huawei's innovative data protection solution has helped them improve service quality and reduce unnecessary expenses. This outstanding solution has given them great development capabilities and will nurture them into a competitive enterprise in the industry.