Ohio’s CBTS may not be a household name like Google or Amazon, but it boasts a much longer and extensive history than either. The firm traces its roots to local telephone kingpin Cincinnati Bell, which began operating all the way back in 1873. Come the corporate technology boom of the 1980s and 1990s, the company decided to capitalize on the sudden surge in demand for enterprise computing by setting up a hardware business.

After finding success in reselling servers, storage arrays and networking equipment, it expanded into the adjacent co-location space through the acquisition of CyrusOne in 2010, a $525 million bet that produced even greater returns than the original. Three years later, as it was nearing the one million square feet mark on the data center floor space front, Cincinnati Bell spun off the provider into a publicly-traded company and simultaneously launched another ambitious pivot, this time into the managed services space. CBTS represents the spearhead of that push.

Getting back to the roots

A few years ago, CBTS began seeing demand for a new billing model among clients, a growing number of whom were suddenly turning to the public cloud for a more convenient alternative to buying hardware and management services separately.  In response, the company went full circle, returning to the subscription scheme Cincinnati Bell has been employing since the 19th century and making parts of its portfolio available as ready-to-use services.

Of the lineup, backup was first on the list for cloudification and proved to be the most difficult to adapt, according to Bill Ehrman, who heads the storage architecture group at CBTS. He appeared on the latest episode of SiliconANGLE’s Cube Conversations to explain the challenge and share how his firm managed to overcome it.

A base to work with

Organizations typically only commit to a major infrastructure overhaul out of pressing necessity,  but CBTS was equally if not more concerned with enabling future growth than tackling current issues when making the switch from its old environment, Ehrman told host Dave Vellante. Before the upgrade, the company’s main problem was  one that most others would wish they had: too much demand. Its setup, which consisted of an IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) installation that acted as the backup server, a group of NetApp VTL systems that served as the primary target ad Alacritus tape libraries for long-term retention purposes,  functioned properly but wasn’t scalable enough to keep up.

“It worked very well but it turned out to be our ‘worst enemy’ because it was very successful, and we ran into a situation where that couldn’t be expanding anymore,” Ehrman detailed. The situation only went downhill from there.

NetApp ended up acquiring Alacritus and incorporating its technology into its NearStore family, a move that held promise at first but proved to be a flop a few years later when the vendor announced that it is disconnecting the development of the line after losing the bid for Data Domain to EMC. That left the series “orphaned,” as Ehrman put it, forcing CBTS to find an alternative that could support its long-term plans.

Differentiating against the cloud’s Big Three

The company wanted to take the opportunity to unify its backup environment, but  gave up on that goal upon upon reaching the conclusion that none of the different products available on the marketplace had what it take to make that happen, Ehrman said. It found the next best thing in Data Domain, which turned out to be a most suitable compromise. By deploying the EMC subsidiary’s DD990 series platform, a product pegged as the industry’s  fastest deduplication storage controller for backup and archiving, CBTS managed to greatly simplify management and reduce its cloud rates much closer to that of the major providers.

“We were able to go back and say ‘you were right, our costs were high, but we were able to reduce our costs.’ We’re getting fantastic dedupe rates, even with TSM, on the Data Domain appliances. So now we can come back to the customer and drop our prices to what they already have and anything new they bring it,” Ehrman said. EMC’s pay-as-you-go option played at least as big of a role in making that happen as the systems themselves, he added, enabling CBTS to add more capacity as needed rather than in advance.

Extended reach

After Data Domain, CBTS adapted the storage vendor’s Avamar backup and recovery suite, which Ehrman said has allowed his company to make its cloud-based backup service available outside its co-location facilities, expanding its market reach.  The software also made it possible for the  firm to launch an entirely new service that allows customers to set up a local Avamar node for on-premise backups and automatically replicate those copies to the CBTS cloud for increased reliability.

“That gives you the best of both worlds, and it’s a model that we had no way to support before. The other options that we were looking for were designed for SMBs, they lacked a lot of integration and having a local copy was basically impossible I wanted to put something out there that I had to support,” Ehrman highlighted.

photo credit: Marco Bellucci via photopin cc