“It’s very common for companies in Finland to outsource their IT to managed service providers,” says Juha Leinonen, Storage and Backup Architect at Enfo. “After all, if your business isn’t IT, why be in the IT business? Lots of demand has led to lots of supply, so we have to work hard to keep differentiating ourselves from the competition.”
Enfo aims to outshine its competitors by delivering managed services that are consistently robust and cost-effective. As a result, the Enfo team must take great care in selecting the technology to support this part of the company’s service offering.
Jyrki Karjalainen, Business Development Manager at Enfo, explains: “Customers are becoming more selective, which means we cannot afford to drop our level of service and we must maintain competitive pricing. The solutions we choose to host our customers’ environments play a crucial role in ensuring that we can deliver on their expectations around availability and cost-efficiency.”
As Enfo’s existing production data storage system approached end of life, the team had to work harder to sustain consistent performance and saw maintenance costs rise. Both these factors threatened the company’s profit margins, so it kicked off a search for new solutions.
Leinonen comments: “We really sweat our IT assets, so when we start seeing a degradation in performance we have to act fast. Our goal is to minimize the resources we spend managing our IT infrastructure, so we can pass on the savings to our customers in the form of competitive fees.”
Recognizing that data is often its customers’ most important asset, Enfo also set out to enhance its approach to data protection. Leinonen says: “We decided to deploy Rubrik backup and replication software and move from a single-site configuration to three sites. Our previous backup storage wasn’t keeping up with demand, so we began looking for an alternative that was easy-to-manage, scalable, affordable, and compatible with Rubrik.”
while migrating to new IBM technology.
of managed services provided by Enfo.
To enable high-quality, cost-effective managed services, Enfo selected IBM® Storage to support both primary and backup environments for its customers. The company considered solutions from multiple vendors before choosing IBM.
Karjalainen explains: “We have a long, successful history with IBM technology —deploying it both internally and for our customers. However, we always review the market before making our selection, and for both these projects, the IBM proposal matched our requirements the best. To us, IBM technology represents resilience and availability, which are priorities for our managed services offering.”
For its customers’ primary workloads, Enfo opted for IBM FlashSystem® 7300 storage. Built on IBM Spectrum® Virtualize software, the solution includes high-density tiers of flash storage in a cost-effective package.
Leinonen adds: “Setting up FlashSystem was very easy, and we took advantage of the tight integration with VMware to enable a seamless migration of our customer workloads. It’s ideally suited to support the diverse range of applications we host for our customers, which include Oracle databases, Microsoft SQL Server, file shares and many more. The best thing about FlashSystem is that it can store any type of data with little to no finetuning.”
To replace its secondary storage for data backups, Enfo chose IBM Cloud® Object Storage, a software-defined hyperscale storage solution. The company first deployed IBM Cloud Object Storage at two sites, before eventually moving to a three-site configuration.
Leinonen recalls: “Before selecting IBM Cloud Object Storage, we considered public cloud services as a target destination for the backups of data we host for our customers. However, we soon realized that approach could be both excessive and unpredictable in terms of cost. In contrast, IBM Cloud Object Storage offered a highly cost-efficient option that we could scale in line with changing customer demand. Again, we were able to just set it up and go, with very few modifications at the time of deployment or since.”
Enfo saw an immediate impact on performance following the implementation of IBM FlashSystem storage. The boost in response times is helping the company to meet agreed service levels, contributing to customer retention.
Karjalainen says: “It’s rare for an MSP to hear anything from their customers unless something has gone wrong! But after we deployed latest-generation IBM FlashSystem storage, we had customer contacts us to say they’d noticed an increase in performance. For them to notice the change, the increase must have been substantial. By enabling us to deliver positive customer experiences like these, IBM technology helps us minimize churn.”
To enable competitive pricing, Enfo is utilizing built-in IBM Storage features. For example, storage compression helps the company drive up resource utilization, and automation tools reduce the administrative burden on the managed services team.
Leinonen comments: “IBM FlashSystem offers powerful compression capabilities that allow us to get great returns on our investment. Both IBM FlashSystem and Cloud Object Storage require very little ongoing administration, so our team are free to focus on more valuable activities. In combination, these factors mean that we can offer reasonable fees to customers while protecting our profit margins.”
Karjalainen concludes: “IBM Storage is helping us to deliver 100 percent data availability to our managed services customers. We don’t know how much our technology decisions influence potential customers, but if they ask, we’re always happy to say we use IBM.”
Enfo is a Nordic IT services company that helps enterprises achieve their data-driven business transformation goals. Employing more than 800 people, Enfo has over 350 customers across various industries. It offers services around digital trust, data and analytics, applications, integration, cloud platforms, and managed services.
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