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Industry: Technology & Media
Location: Stuttgart, Germany
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Empalis Consulting GmbH

Highlights

  • Integrates seamlessly with IBM Spectrum Protect to keep client data secure
  • Enables dynamic data growth thanks to easy expansion of storage capacity
  • Forms the foundation for backup-as-a-service offering with attractive pricing model
  • Eliminates the need for expensive, time-consuming storage system migrations
Increasing digitization brings with it an enormous surge in data volumes—data that businesses must store and protect. To offer clients a more cost-efficient option for reliable, long-term data backup, Empalis Consulting GmbH partnered with SUSE and IBM. Now, clients can use SUSE Enterprise Storage with IBM Spectrum Protect to streamline backup environments. Clients can also integrate SUSE Enterprise Storage as a backup target, enabling rapid recovery in the event of disaster.

Overview

Empalis is an IT services provider headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. The company provides custom solutions and services in the areas of middleware and collaboration, distributed systems, system automation, storage and backup, IT security, big data, analytics, and predictive analytics. Empalis is a leading training partner for IBM Spectrum Protect software and employs 40 people, serving businesses of all sizes, across all industries and verticals, with a primary focus on Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

The Challenge

The rapid pace of digitization is impacting every business. With data volumes increasing, many businesses struggle to keep pace.

Markus Stumpf, Head of Operations and Service at Empalis Consulting GmbH, elaborates: “Clients are generating vast amounts of data that they can analyze to gain exciting insights into their business. But storing and protecting all this data represents a huge challenge. We help clients safeguard operations against outage or data corruption.”

Empalis helps clients design and implement advanced backup solutions to fit their unique business needs.

Dominik Bosch, Account Manager at Empalis Consulting GmbH, remarks: “An effective backup strategy is critical, but all too often an afterthought. We are changing that.”

“We were impressed by the tight coordination between SUSE and IBM. SUSE worked hard to ensure the performance was fully certified for IBM Spectrum Protect, and involved us at every stage of the process. We have a great relationship with the SUSE team—we speak the same language, in every sense.”
MARKUS STUMPF
Head of Operations & Service
Empalis Consulting GmbH

SUSE Solution

Empalis delivers 95 percent of German-language training workshops for the IBM Spectrum Protect backup software. Equipped with deep product knowledge, the team looked for new options to enable clients to make even better use of available resources.

Markus Stumpf comments: “IBM Spectrum Protect is an integral part of our business. We wanted to start using SUSE Enterprise Storage as a backup target for IBM Spectrum Protect. The advantage of this combination is a flexible, super-scalable foundation that helps our clients to meet growing demand for backup storage.”

Empalis worked closely with SUSE and IBM to optimize SUSE Enterprise Storage for use with IBM Spectrum Protect, and IBM officially validated the deployment option.

Markus Stumpf says: “We were impressed by the tight coordination between SUSE and IBM. SUSE worked hard to ensure the performance was fully certified for IBM Spectrum Protect, and involved us at every stage of the process. We have a great relationship with the SUSE team—we speak the same language, in every sense.”

SUSE Enterprise Storage runs on commodity hardware, making it a highly scalable, fast, and cost-effective software-defined storage solution. The SUSE solution supports block and object storage services and is compatible with the widely used S3 protocol.

Dominik Bosch confirms: “A traditional appliance approach is often too restrictive. With SUSE Enterprise Storage our clients can expand backup capacity quickly and easily—it’s as simple as adding a node to the storage cluster. SUSE Enterprise Storage is hardware-agnostic, so you can use commodity servers rather than more-expensive proprietary systems with high follow-up costs for expansions, avoiding costs and vendor lock-in.”

The Results

Building on SUSE Enterprise Storage and IBM Spectrum Protect, Empalis can implement reliable, scalable, cost-effective backup solutions to keep client data protected, no matter what.

Markus Stumpf explains: “SUSE Enterprise Storage offers unmatched protection of investment in storage infrastructure. This future-proof solution adds flexibility, so clients can scale when needed, using the most suitable servers to meet business needs. We view SUSE Enterprise Storage as a competitive storage solution for clients with backup volumes of 150 TB or more.”

The solution can also simplify data center infrastructure by converging the Storage Area Network with the main network for the backup environment. Dominik Bosch adds: “SUSE Enterprise Storage offers a route to modernize and streamline backup storage environments. Consolidating network equipment reduces data center complexity and operating costs. Furthermore, with SUSE Enterprise Storage, disruptive data migrations from one technology to the next generation are no longer necessary. Clients can replace nodes flexibly, without the need for a time-consuming migration project.”

Thanks to the validation by IBM, SUSE Enterprise Storage offers the ideal foundation for backups, scaling seamlessly to support ever-increasing data volumes with an attractive, transparent pricing model.

Markus Stumpf concludes: “Our collaboration with SUSE has added new value to our portfolio. Clients can integrate SUSE Enterprise Storage as a backup target, enabling rapid recovery in the event of disaster. Using SUSE Enterprise Storage, we benefit from low maintenance overheads and an easy graphical management console combined with the highest levels of reliability. In our experience, SUSE Enterprise Storage is one of the most innovative storage solutions on the market.”