The rise in data centre outages and breaches in recent times has resulted in an increased need for suitable AI and cloud technologies.

Gartner expects at least 75% of IT organisations to face one or more ransomware attacks by 2025, and protecting clients' core assets requires an infrastructure that fortifies data and keeps equipment safe.

Plan B New Zealand, a company renowned for its reliable IT and business continuity services, is bolstering its data centre infrastructure through a partnership with VAST Data.

VAST Data's high-capacity, all-flash platform was selected by Plan B New Zealand to ensure its data centres remain operational regardless of a cyber attack, data loss or security and networking issues.

Plan B provides high-performance, in-country, and cost-effective hybrid cloud and cloud object storage to other cloud service providers (CSPs) and integrators, including some of the largest Microsoft cloud partners in New Zealand.

Plan B's data centres also require a high degree of flexibility to scale depending on the needs and goals of the business. 

The company recognised that to fulfil its mission of ensuring its customers' data is protected, it needed to update its storage devices. It also wanted a solution to facilitate its strategy of creating new and innovative products for its customers. Plan B turned to VAST Data to enable lightning-fast backups and restore performance in the event of an attack or outage.

VAST delivers petabyte-scale all-flash storage applicable for wide-ranging applications, including backups and restores with the Veeam platform. 

On top of this, VAST's Universal Storage platform restores business-critical data and applications up to 50x faster than legacy purpose-built backup appliances (PBBAs). It can meet stringent recovery time objectives (RTOs) by providing 8x more restore performance at 40% lower cost than legacy backup targets and object stores. 

Plan B is moving all its customer data to flash storage. VAST's all-flash object storage platform delivers up to 100Gb on the front and back end, enabling Plan B's customers to retrieve archived data in seconds as opposed to days with legacy platforms. 

Another key benefit of VAST's Universal Storage is its disaggregated shared everything (DASE) architecture, which separates the storage function from compute, helping to drive performance and storage capacity.

Diego Nievas, Director of Product and Technology Innovation, Plan B, says that the partnership with VAST brings together a culmination of values and shared excellence.

"We found in VAST a partner that valued resilience as much as we do, enabling an S3aaS platform to remain operational under any circumstances," he says.

"We don't have to worry about the platform at all — there is low-to-zero touch. VAST handles all our maintenance and service and firmware upgrades. This is a huge benefit for us as it can be hard to find resources."

Universal Storage's Indestructible Snapshots feature also delivers the immutability essential to Plan B. Indestructible Snapshots safeguards data by preventing critical backup copies and snapshots from being altered or destroyed by any individual before their expiration date.

In the event of an attack, VAST's platform allows Plan B to crawl through the data to find viruses, cryptolockers and ransomware. 

"VAST allows us to restore quickly and make sure it's correct … killing two birds with one stone," says Nievas.

Howard Fyffe, Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand, VAST Data, also highlights the impressive capabilities this new partnership will bring to the table.

"With Universal Storage, we have flipped the switch on the capabilities of the data centre," he says 

"With a powerful partner like VAST and our Universal Storage platform, Plan B is assured that it can protect its clients' most valuable asset — their data. 

"The affordability of our all-flash solution enables more companies to benefit from the highest levels of performance, scale, data protection and resiliency needed for today's modern business environment."

Launched in 2019, VAST is the fastest-selling data infrastructure startup in history. VAST Data delivers the data platform at the heart of the AI-powered world, accelerating time-to-insight for workload-intensive applications. 

The performance, scalability, ease of use and cost efficiencies of VAST's software helps enterprise organisations overcome the old barriers to building all-flash data centres.