Colliers International EMEA simplifies secondary storage

Colliers International EMEA is a global operation, with more than 500 offices and 15,000 employees in 68 countries, and clients including Tesco and Sainsbury’s. Its IT infrastructure is critical to the smooth running of the business. Colliers’ highly fragmented, legacy secondary storage resulted in a complex environment that only allowed weekly backups of the unstructured data. The company’s technical architect, Paul Khosla, led the refresh project, with the specific aim to enhance Colliers’ VDI, LAN and WAN environments. The goal was to move from a three-tier architecture to a hyperconverged infrastructure, in order to consolidate its secondary storage into a single data platform.

 

Cohesity’s native cloud integration with Microsoft Azure allowed Colliers to eliminate tapes and archive data to the public cloud. This streamlined the backup process and reduced the company’s time to recovery with the following benefits:

 

o        Simplified infrastructure: with Cohesity, Colliers dramatically reduced its data centre footprint by 90%. Cohesity also eliminated all silos, consolidating Colliers’ secondary data on a single platform.

o        Enhanced performance and protection: instead of backing up once a day or week, with Cohesity, the IT team now backs up every hour, without any impact to the users or performance. 

o        Lower TCO: Colliers reduced its TCO by 50% thanks to Cohesity’s all in one hyperconverged solution for secondary storage

 

The IT team was so satisfied that Colliers now plans to use Cohesity’s zero-cost clone functionality to remotely spin up clones on Cohesity for disaster recovery testing, and confirm that all virtual machines can be restored when required.

 

Channel partner CDW introduced Colliers to Cohesity. After two months of research and running proof-of-concept tests, Khosla’s team selected Cohesity as its new infrastructure provider for Colliers’ highly fragmented secondary storage. The team was impressed by the vendor’s ability to go beyond unstructured data issues, as Cohesity was able to provide a complete secondary storage solution that includes data protection, cloud integration and test/dev on a single hyperconverged platform.

 

“With Cohesity, we consolidated our data protection, our files and our cloud archival on a single, easy-to-use hyperconverged solution. Instead of weekly backups, thanks to Cohesity we were able to enhance our data protection and we are now able to run backup jobs hourly,” said Paul Khosla, technical architect, Colliers International.