Endor simplifies and scales data management, reduces data recovery time over 99%

The Challenge

Towards the end of 2020, Endor faced a significant technology challenge. While the company had grown quickly and successfully, it had also outgrown its IT infrastructure.

Magnus Franklin, Chief Technology Officer at Endor, says his company relied on a complex array of partners and licenses to help serve its clients. Endor’s IT environment involved many moving parts and interfaces across its backup software and disk devices. Worse still, Endor’s legacy Veeam backup, HPE 3PAR storage, and HPE Apollo server environment were running out of support.

Franklin says the legacy infrastructure required a huge amount of maintenance. The level of complexity was such that staff would suffer from sleepless nights as they worried about potential network downtime or new backups choking Endor’s existing storage arrays.

The antiquated nature of the environment called for investment in its data management infrastructure. Franklin and his colleagues believed that investing in next-gen technologies would create a simpler IT setup that was easier to manage.

By reducing the complexity of Endor’s environment, Franklin says the IT team believed they could improve the service levels they offered to its customers, and also create a platform that would allow the company to start offering new services to the technology marketplace.

“We took a step back, looked at everything, and we thought ‘what can we do that would make sense in five years?’ And that was really an easy decision on our behalf. We are planning to grow a lot in our domestic market in the coming years. ‘Scalability is key,’ that’s the mantra we’ve been saying—and the Cohesity solution that we’ve implemented is extremely scalable.”

The Solution

In February 2021, Endor made the move to Cohesity’s modern, software-defined platform. Cohesity provides compute, flash, and HDD capacity to help Endor consolidate its data services. Endor implemented Cohesity DataProtect, a radically simple backup and recovery solution that allows the company to eliminate legacy infrastructure silos.

Franklin says selecting Cohesity was a straightforward decision. Endor was already a Cohesity reseller to many of its Icelandic customers, and had seen great returns on investments, as well as secure and reliable data management. Franklin says it made sense to use technology that they already trusted and were proposing as a solution to customers’ business challenges.

“We’ve been working with Cohesity a long time, so we understand the technology from a technical level. We also know from experience the difference the solution offers in terms of support levels.”

Before Franklin and his colleagues could implement the Cohesity technology, they had to justify the investment to Endor’s board. They focused on two key areas: simplification and scalability.

The IT team demonstrated how a shift to Cohesity would simplify the environment, with the ability to slash the amount of hours that the IT staff at Endor spent maintaining its existing legacy infrastructure.

Data management from Cohesity would require very little operational effort, and instead of relying on the previous complex set of systems and partners, Endor would have one next-gen platform to manage through an easy-to-operate user interface.

Cohesity’s scalability would enable Franklin and his colleagues to scale capacity in response to new business demands. As the popularity of Endor’s service increased and new customers were brought on board, further capacity could be added simply and effectively.

“Our business case to the board was that this is something that will scale perfectly going forward for our backup service, adding additional capacity as needed,” Franklin says. “We showed how easy it would be for us to also scale for our customers using Cohesity—and without taking on a bunch of additional costs.”

The Results

Franklin says the migration from Veeam to Cohesity was extremely smooth. Endor already had the experience of implementing Cohesity for some of its customers, including DK Software which made the transition even more straightforward.

“It was incredibly easy. We had already worked extensively with Cohesity, so I expected an incredibly simplified process compared to our legacy infrastructure. The actual setup was just so streamlined—it arrived, we racked it, plugged it in, and we started backing up data on the same day it was delivered to us.”

Cohesity helped Endor realize “incredible compression and deduplication” with storage reduction of over 55x. Endor can continue to increase the amount of data it stores for its customers without having to increase the amount of capacity.

Franklin also knew the solution could be scaled up easily if required. Shortly after deploying Cohesity, Endor successfully bid to provide backup services to Vodafone Iceland. Franklin and his colleagues made the business case to the board to scale up capacity to help satisfy this new demand. This case was successful and led to the purchase of additional Cohesity solutions with a 50% increase in capacity.

Using Cohesity has had a huge impact on human resources. Rather than having to rely on three in-house staff members to actively manage Endor’s legacy IT environment, these resources are freed up to work on strategic projects and can focus on acquiring new business. Franklin can now manage the Cohesity platform single-handedly—and he does that work in addition to his other day-to-day responsibilities. Backups and recoveries are also much faster. Major restores that might once have taken as many as 26 hours can now be completed in just 10 seconds.

Franklin explains how Endor recently onboarded a new major Icelandic customer, Vodafone Iceland. By working with Endor and its Cohesity platform, Vodafone Iceland increased the number of virtual machines it can back up five fold, due to Cohesity’s superior deduplication and compression compared to its previous Veeam solution. For another customer, Franklin created a new development environment and used Cohesity’s backup technology to migrate databases to this environment. The entire migration process took just 25 minutes.

“This was something that wasn’t even possible in our old infrastructure. We simply didn’t have the capacity to offer the number of services and solutions that we can now,” he says.

Endor is seeing cost savings with Cohesity through less infrastructure to manage and fewer data center facilities, as well as reduced time for operational management with such a simplified solution. The company’s old infrastructure took up 20 rack-space units across three data centres. Now with Cohesity, that space has been condensed to just four units in one rack. Franklin expects a complete return on investment in possibly 24 months and no more than three years.

If there are any technical issues that need to be solved, Franklin describes Cohesity’s support services as “outstanding.” He can contact the support team at any time of day with any kind of concern, even a low-priority issue, and receives almost instant answers: “The way they work aligns almost linearly with the way we want to work.”

Endor continues to grow as a business. As well as hosting, the company is pushing into new areas, including file-sharing services. Now that the scalability of Cohesity has been proven, Franklin says the aim is to add further capacity either later this year or in early 2022: “If we invest, we improve our infrastructure and our future customers will benefit—so that’s really a no-brainer decision.”

When it comes to advice for other IT managers, Franklin says Cohesity provides a great platform for fast-growing businesses that want a quick return on investment: “If you just look one year into the future, the time that you spend on the initial deployment, on meetings, and on support cases will be very small compared with the time you would have spent maintaining an older infrastructure—and you’ll be no closer to growing. I’m fully confident in the way we work now. If you want to create a scalable platform for growth, then Cohesity is the obvious partner.”