Helping IRIS Professional Solutions bring the benefits of software defined storage within the financial reach of all clients

Executive Overview:

IRIS Professional Solutions wanted to bring the benefits of software-defined storage – high performance, resilience and flexibility – within the financial reach of all clients. By implementing SUSE® Enterprise Storage, based on open source Ceph technology, IRIS Professional Solutions gained a software-defined platform that supports massive scale with object oriented storage built on commodity industry standard hardware.

IRIS Professional Solutions at a Glance

IRIS Professional Solutions provides solutions and services that guide companies through their digital transformation, with an extended portfolio covering Enterprise Information Management, Hybrid Cloud, Consulting Services and Business Process Outsourcing.

SUSE’s installation and management tools minimize management overheads and risk of disruption during patches and upgrades, helping IRIS Professional Solutions to offer extremely competitive and simplistic storage solution.

IRIS Professional Solutions overview:

Founded in 1987, IRIS Professional Solutions have been a member of the Canon Group since 2013, and is a key competence center in Information Management for the global organization.
IRIS Professional Solutions relies on a well-known reputation for innovation, and offers a complete range of technological solutions, products and services. Its goal is to help organizations better manage their information, and transform their assets into digital data.

Challenge:

Most businesses today need to support several diverse technology platforms: on premise and cloud-based applications and databases; communication and networking systems; data storage, backup and recovery solutions. In many cases, the cost – in time, money and management focus of maintaining internal personnel to manage all these technologies outweighs the perceived benefits. This represents a significant business opportunity for expert firms like IRIS Professional Solutions, which specializes in managed services within a broad portfolio of business and IT offerings.

Geert Reynaerts, Delivery Director Hybrid Cloud Solutions & Services at IRIS Professional Solutions, said:

“Our clients want to focus on their core competencies, so they entrust some or all of their IT operations to us—either through support for their on premise technologies or as a fully outsourced service. Seeing that clients were increasingly looking for low cost highly scalable object oriented storage, particularly for media files and other important but infrequently accessed data, we wanted to find a cost-effective, highly scalable, risk free solution for them”

Solution:

Designing, deploying and managing enterprise data storage solutions has historically been a major activity for IRIS Professional Solutions, and the company was already running a software defined storage (SDS) platform for its larger clients. Extending this solution to smaller clients was not viable, as high licensing fees from third-party software vendors put it out of their financial reach.

“We wanted an alternative approach for clients who liked the SDS concept but couldn’t justify the cost,” said Geert Reynaerts. The open source Ceph solution was promising, but our tests showed that maintaining the solution would be time consuming, so the saving on licensing would be counter balanced by additional management costs. By selecting SUSE Enterprise Storage, powered by Ceph technology we gained access to all the benefits of Ceph without any downsides.”

SUSE Enterprise Storage enables rapid provisioning and easy management of extremely scalable unified block, file and object storage on commodity industry standard hardware. Additional tools like OpenATTIC combined with methodologies, and expert support from SUSE delivered a smooth deployment and simply management of the Ceph based technology, enabling IRIS Professional Solutions to offer enterprise class mass storage services at economical prices without compromise.

“As a service provider, we need technologies that run smoothly and securely. Designing, deploying and managing enterprise data storage solutions has historically been a major activity for IRIS Professional Solutions, and the company was already running a software defined storage (SDS) platform for its larger clients. Extending this solution to smaller clients was not viable, as high licensing fees from the third-party software vendor put it out of their financial reach.”

“We wanted an alternative approach for clients who liked the SDS concept but couldn’t justify the cost,” said Geert Reynaerts. “The open source Ceph solution was promising, but our tests showed that maintaining the solution would be time-consuming, so the saving on licensing would be counter-balanced by additional management costs. By selecting SUSE Enterprise Storage, we gained access to all the benefits of Ceph without any downsides.”

Results:

Choosing SUSE Enterprise Storage, powered by Ceph Technology has given IRIS Professional Solutions the ability to meet client demands for fast, resilient, low-cost mass-data storage within an easy to manage, scalable and highly environment. The architecture naturally delivers exceptional resiliency and availability thanks to automated optimization and self-healing capabilities, and enables practically unlimited scalability without downtime.

“SUSE Enterprise Storage enables us to deliver enterprise-class software-defined storage solutions without complexity or excessive management overhead,” said Geert Reynaerts. “For example, we can add and remove servers from the cluster without doing any manual data migration, and we can change redundancy and high availability levels without downtime.”

As SUSE’s first accredited partner in Belgium, IRIS Professional Solutions also has advanced skills in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications (on both x86 and IBM Power architectures) and SUSE Manager. Nevertheless, the company remains fully independent, with a multi-vendor perspective.

“We hold accreditations from several major technology companies, and we always propose the best solution after analysing each client’s situation, even if it’s not in our portfolio!” said Geert Reynaerts.

“We value SUSE technology for its stability, flexibility, manageability, openness and long-term support, and we find our corporate mind set is closely aligned with SUSE’s, which is great news for our joint clients.”

About SUSE Enterprise Storage:

SUSE Enterprise Storage enables IT organizations to accelerate innovation, reduce costs and alleviate proprietary hardware lock-in by transforming their enterprise storage infrastructure with a truly open, and unified intelligent software-defined storage management solution.

https://www.suse.com/solutions/software-defined-storage/