French MSP saves 30% on cloud costs as it deploys Cubbit | JP

Paris-based Cloudreso.com has saved 30% on cloud object storage costs by deploying Cubbit’s DS3 distributed object storage.

Cloudreso.com is a managed service provider (MSP) that distributes value-added data protection and security solutions. It provides turnkey services across all French-speaking countries, with a big focus on the sovereignty of data. Its customers are often providers themselves, who sell to their customers. It also supplies services directly to customers.

Cloudreso.com runs services from three datacentres near Paris, with plans for two more near Lille at the end of May 2024.

A core focus is to provide its customers with S3 cloud object storage services that are secure, and for which they can guarantee data location and sovereignty. Much of this is as a target – a scale-out backup repository (SOBR) – for backups via Veeam, Acronis, Veritas, and the like, which Cloudreso.com provides.

Gilles Gozlan, CEO of Cloudreso.com, said: “We don’t just sell storage. We sell the expertise on the backup side and on the S3 connectors. It’s a turnkey service where the customer gets the tools to ensure success in their projects. We know all the backup software and S3 to provide that.”

Before selecting Cubbit, Gozlan said the company had tried many US and French storage providers. These included Wasabi, Backblaze, OVH, Pure Storage, NextCloud, Synology and QNAP.

Core to the shortcomings of the cloud aspect of these services was that to some extent they were a black box to CloudReso.com’s technical team, which meant the company incurred hidden costs linked to S3 that included egress, deletion and bucket replication fees.  

With Cubbit, it has been able to deploy capacity across its datacentres that serve the vast majority of its customers – bar some on 10-year contracts, for which Wasabi is retained – and gain complete control of that infrastructure.

Cubbit’s S3-based object storage targets customers that want secure, resilient and sovereign storage for use cases such as backup and less-than-mission-critical workloads such as content delivery and collaboration.

DS3 Composer builds a peer-to-peer cloud built on customer nodes – physical or virtual – to act as a gateway and broker in a mesh with other customer nodes.

Minimum node deployment is three, which allows for data to be shared for resilience and security. Nodes can be on-site or in the cloud, although the latter is less cost-effective and bare metal is the preferred option if a node is off-site. 

Key S3 application programming interfaces (APIs) that CloudReso.com makes use of include Lifecycle Configuration, which sets the lifecycle of data and objects, and Object Lock to add a layer of data protection from ransomware and prevent unauthorised data access or deletion.

Total capacity deployed on Cubbit DS3 distributed cloud is 400TB. Cubbit’s DS3 Composer also enables the delivery of cloud storage services. Up to 2PB (petabytes) of capacity is possible with three locations, and 4PB if that’s expanded to four.

The key benefit for Gozlan is that Cubbit allows CloudReso.com to provide sovereign, secure, geo-distributed storage at a competitive price.

“DS3 Composer is very important because we can offer sovereignty of storage to French customers,” he said.  

Cubbit’s pricing structure is also a key benefit, said Gozlan, because it’s fixed per terabyte. “No options, no fees, with everything included,” he said. “Scalability is important and that’s why we like a clear formula.”

Cost savings over alternatives in the market have also been considerable, with CloudReso.com saving something like 30% compared to what similar functionality and capacity would cost elsewhere, according to Gozlan.

Key to the benefits in terms of functionality is that CloudReso.com gets control over everything it provides to its customers. “When you are an S3 provider and you don’t have control over all S3 features, you’re eventually going to have problems with customers,” said Gozlan.