XO Communications had run into a challenge that is common in today’s data-driven era. As one of the nation’s largest providers of VoIP, telecommunications, and cloud services, the company had accumulated a lot of data that needed to be protected and archived.
Customers rely on XO Communications, a Verizon Company, for its private data network, cloud connectivity, unified communications, internet access, and managed services. The company has 1.5 million fiber strand miles in its network, including approximately 20,000 route-miles of intercity fiber and 13,500 route-miles of metro fiber.
The company’s IT team operates eight data centers across the country, including three that are managed for various government entities. And these government contracts require network providers such as XO Communications to keep logs, backups, and audits for three years. This requirement had dramatically increased the company’s data protection needs.
Thus the company began the search for a secondary-storage solution that would be scalable and easy-to-manage, and which would significantly lower its Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
Reduced Data Center TCO by Sixty Percent
After an extensive proof-of-concept project in which it considered several options, XO Communications found what it needed in Cohesity, which would be half the cost and offer unlimited scalability compared with competing solutions from Dell EMC Isilon and Veeam.
XO Communications deployed Cohesity C2300 and C2500 hyperconverged node appliances with Cohesity DataProtect backup and recovery software. This enabled XO Communications’ IT team to provision test/dev environments directly on Cohesity.
Cohesity furthermore helped the company increase storage capacity while concurrently reducing capital expenses (CapEx) due to a smaller data center footprint. In fact, XO Communications has already lowered its data center TCO by 60 percent due to Cohesity’s high capacity and small footprint — approximately 100 TB of raw storage per 2U appliance — and ease of management, which requires fewer administrators.
XO Communications was also able to lower its operating expenses (OpEx) due to Cohesity’s ease of management. The new system requires only one administrator rather than the anticipated six that would have been needed for the alternatives.
Ready, Set, Future
Using Cohesity as the foundation for its scalable, hyperconverged secondary storage system, XO Communications is now in a position to meet its customer needs while accommodating its ever-growing data.
