AWS partner saves client 'hundreds of thousands'

Melbourne-based cloud services provider RedBear IT has helped Think Procurement save "hundreds of thousands" of dollars with disaster recovery technology from Zadara Storage.

Think Procurement is a Melbourne e-procurement services provider established by Adam Ryan, one of five founding members of recruitment site Seek. The company needed an easy-to-access copy of data for disaster recovery (DR) and availability without affecting security and privacy commitments.

The company, which had previously worked with RedBear IT to move applications from an in-house data centre to the cloud in 2014, selected the provider to develop a solution that offered immediate and future data availability – without the upfront cost of traditional DR.

Steve Ash, chief operating officer of Think Procurement, said: "RedBear IT and Zadara Storage architected a flexible as-a-service solution to resolve our immediate storage challenges while saving us hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Think Procurement has its entire technical platform in the AWS environment, with the exception of some existing DR features. RedBear IT developed a layered solution using AWS capabilities such as snapshots and an AWS multi-availability zone implementation for immediate access.

Redbear deployed Zadara Storage's virtual private storage array (VPSA) for block-based storage, to offer Think Procurement quick access to a copy of its most critical data.

"That it saved us a lot of capital [and] at the same time it allowed us to do backup and restore and have scalability... we just pay as we use," said Ash.

Zadara Storage chief operating officer Noam Shendar said: "Thanks to our connectivity arrangement with AWS and our physical proximity to them, our storage is accessible to AWS customers from within the AWS environment as if it were local storage (in all regards: speed, latency, and network security). Think Procurement, therefore, accesses our VPSA storage array via their AWS compute resources (virtual machines)."

RedBear IT's managing director is Doug Woodford, who started his career in the technology market at Logicalis and Veritas.

California-headquarted Zadara Storage is a storage-as-a-service provider that entered the Australian market back in April 2014 when Canadian reseller SereniTaas hosted an instance of Zadara on the AWS cloud.

Although Zadara Storage does not have an office in the region, it has a local sales manager in Melbourne and is on the lookout for a sales representative.