1901 Group reduces costs by 35% and sees 115x deduplication and compression

The Challenge

Many federal agencies turn to 1901 Group to deliver a modern data management environment, with options for data archive in the cloud. Before offering Cohesity to its clients, 1901 Group was looking for a solution to solve its own internal data management, with the near-term plan to offer enterprise backup services that meet strict regulatory and security requirements, including FedRAMP government cloud certification.

1901 Group wanted to move away from aging legacy infrastructure, and also address similar challenges for its clients that often were juggling three or more legacy platforms for data backup and recovery. For its own data management as a service provider, 1901 Group consistently ran out of capacity, and when capacity was at the maximum, the only option was to buy a new, expensive chassis to scale its customer-facing offerings.

1901 Group set out to identify a solution that would allow operational flexibility, scalability, and predictability and so it began to integrate Cohesity into its client-service offerings. While many of their customers indicated a desire to move to the cloud, the cost savings had to be compelling. 1901 Group needed to ensure they would be addressing cybersecurity threats and compliance concerns.

They also needed a solution with FISMA compliance, and Authority to Operate on DoD networks.

The Solution

After comparing four solutions, including an analysis of pricing structures and features, 1901 Group chose Cohesity after a strong Proof of Concept (PoC) demonstrated outstanding benefits and the ability to carry the 1901 Group forward.

Cohesity was deployed internally for backup and recovery, and for file and object services to manage shares of VMware images and SQL backups from file servers for operational purposes. Cohesity nodes were deployed across its data center locations, forming a pervasive data fabric across all their cloud endpoints. Soon after, 1901 Group integrated Cohesity in its EBaaS to offer backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and cloud archival services to its federal customers. Today, 1901 Group manages over 5 PB of data with Cohesity with the confidence to meet future demands without the need for forklift upgrades.

The Results

From the initial deployment internally at 1901 Group, Cohesity enabled efficiency across the board. One of the most immediate results was the improvement in data recovery time. Recovering data that would previously take a few hours, was down to under one minute with the Cohesity platform. The success from managing its internal operations with Cohesity gave 1901 Group complete confidence to integrate it into and enlarge its EBaaS client offering.

Another key benefit was Cohesity’s ability to reduce the data footprint with impressive deduplication and compression. 1901 Group manages 5 PiB of logical data and uses just under 45 TiB of target storage for a total data reduction of 115x. 1901 Group experiences savings up to 35% with Cohesity compared to other competing solutions. 1901 Group is now also using Cohesity for disaster recovery, replicating data across geographic regions between two data centers, and migrating data seamlessly to AWS GovCloud and S3 Glacier for long-term archival based upon policy-based configuration.

The solution not only translates to cost savings for 1901 Group, but provides more predictable metrics to better inform operational and business decisions. With the integration of Cohesity in its portfolio, 1901 Group is now able to support smaller “micro” agencies and help clients that previously went unserved for backup and recovery.

“For our federal clients, you can be the Ferrari of the industry, but if you don’t have the agility to predict cost, it just is not going to work,” explains Walsh. “One of the biggest reasons we went with Cohesity was that the platform enables a predictable cost model for scalability and flexibility to manage a highly-regulated multi-tenant environment.”

As a service provider, 1901 Group finds multiple benefits from the combination of Cohesity’s outstanding deduplication and compression, and data security. These features allow the company to effectively manage cash flow, and align capacity with demand in a multi-tenant provider environment. With the ability to start small and scale and deploy software to multi-node clusters, the Cohesity platform is flexible and scalable. Encryption of data-at-rest and data-in-motion are especially critical for U.S. public sector clients in both commercial and GovCloud AWS environments where security and compliance include particularly stringent requirements.