Sky chooses Cleversafe for petabyte and beyond storage

Sky uses Cleversafe in the UK for its private cloud platform, hosting large amounts of unstructured data, including video, audio, documents, backups and more.

Sky manages multiple petabytes of data. As its unstructured data – video content, archive information and more – began to expand, the company sought a solution that could grow with it. To address the growing data challenge, Sky selected Cleversafe’s storage platform to build a highly scalable and cost efficient storage system.
“As a leading media and communications company, we manage an enormous amount of unstructured data, including video, audio and documents, and every bit of that data needs to be readily accessible. As data grows, it becomes harder and harder to make this a reality in an economically sustainable way,” said Will Westwick, Head of Enterprise Technology at Sky. “Cleversafe’s platform has the maturity and scalability we require, while also supporting our objective to lower datacenter TCO without comprising service. This is a fundamental requirement as we scale.”

The Cleversafe platform also makes global file sharing efficient and secure. Files are relocated seamlessly across Sky’s strategic regional datacenters. The data is extremely reliable and always available. In the two and a half years Sky has utilized Cleversafe, the company has experienced 24/7 data availability.

Ease of use and flexibility are also key to Sky’s storage environment. Managing, scaling and securing Sky’s data management operations has been easy because the Cleversafe platform doesn’t require “heavy lifting.” Sky’s existing storage team has been able to master the system, and Cleversafe delivers a mature support experience. Sky is now able to support its rapid data growth using its existing operational teams. Security is equally as easy to manage. Cleversafe’s patented, geographically dispersed erasure coding method, which houses data as virtualized and encrypted “slices” spread across devices, eliminates the need for costly data replication.

“Sky has never been stronger in technology innovation. From creating new ways to watch and enjoy your favorite shows to utilizing a mobile app for customer service, Sky is at the forefront of using technology to deliver a great customer experience,” said Russ Kennedy, Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and Customer Solutions at Cleversafe. “Our relationship has been a true strategic partnership, and we look forward to continuing on our joint path of innovation.”