Colliers International EMEA Chooses Cohesity

Cohesity, Inc. announced that its C2500 hyperconverged nodes and DataPlatform Virtual Edition virtual appliances have helped commercial real estate specialist Colliers International EMEA Ltd reduce the TCO of its secondary storage by 50%.

Colliers International EMEA is an operation, with more than 500 offices and 15,000 employees in 68 countries, and clients including Tesco and Sainsbury. Its IT infrastructure is critical to the smooth running of the business. Colliers’ highly fragmented, legacy secondary storage resulted in a complex environment that only allowed weekly backups of the unstructured data.

The company’s technical architect, Paul Khosla, led the refresh project, with the specific aim to enhance Colliers’ VDI, LAN and WAN environments. The goal was to move from a three-tier architecture to an hyperconverged infrastructure, in order to consolidate its secondary storage into a single data platform.

Cohesity’s native cloud integration with Azure allowed Colliers to eliminate tapes and archive data to the public cloud.

This streamlined the backup process and reduced
the recovery time with the following benefits: 

• Simplified infrastructure: with Cohesity, Colliers reduced its data centre footprint by 90%. It also eliminated all silos, consolidating Colliers’ secondary data on a single platform.
• Enhanced performance and protection: Instead of backing up once a day or week, with Cohesity, the IT team backups every hour, without any impact to the users or performance.
• Lower TCO: Colliers reduced its TCO by 50% thanks to all in one hyperconverged solution for secondary storage

The IT team was so satisfied that Colliers plans to use Cohesity’s zero-cost clone functionality to remotely spin up clones on Cohesity for DR testing, and confirm that all VMs can be restored when required.

Channel partner CDW Corporation introduced Colliers to Cohesity. After two months of research and running proof-of-concept tests, Khosla’s team selected Cohesity as its infrastructure provider for Colliers’ highly fragmented secondary storage. The team was impressed by the vendor’s ability to go beyond unstructured data issues, as Cohesity was able to provide a complete secondary storage solution that includes data protection, cloud integration and test/dev on a single hyperconverged platform.

“With Cohesity, we consolidated our data protection, our files and our cloud archival on a single, easy-to-use hyperconverged solution. Instead of weekly backups, thanks to Cohesity we were able to enhance our data protection and we are now able to run backup jobs hourly,” said Khosla.

“Large enterprises with multiple locations such as Colliers International EMEA, have to cope with increasing volumes of data at the edge. Our DataPlatform Virtual Edition enables them to create a data fabric that spans from the edge to the data centre and the cloud. Virtual Edition offers end users a simple solution to solve a range of challenges, while reducing the TCO,” said Patrick Rogers, VP marketing and product management, Cohesity.