About the company.

CenturyLink provides managed network and cyber security solutions to enterprise customers in 60 countries.

The challenge.

CenturyLink, a worldwide market leader in networking and communication solutions, was seeking a way to help its customer, a manufacturer of optical and photonic products, to stage up to three petabytes of images per month in the customer’s Taiwan production facility, and then archive the images off-site for disaster recovery purposes. The images needed to be stored, available, and retrievable for a minimum of four years. The storage requirement would average 36PB per year and 144PB over the four-year period.

Edge + OpEx solution required.

To solve this challenge CenturyLink needed a solution that could handle collection, storage, and analysis of massive amounts of data staged locally, and then transmit those data to a cloud environment on a regular basis for backup and disaster recovery purposes. There were cloud-based solutions available, but none had a local “edge” solution that could feed the data to the cloud. There were local storage solutions available, but none had a practical way of transmitting the large volumes of data to a cloud storage target. The solution became even more complex when the requirement for a pay-as-you go, OpEx-based model was added.

The solution.

CenturyLink calls in Zadara.

When CenturyLink received the request, they brought in Zadara as their technology partner. Together, Zadara and CenturyLink architected a solution using Zadara on premises for local staging and advanced data services to ingest the data to AWS S3 and Glacier storage for long-term archiving and disaster recovery. The team proposed a 2PB local cache (Zadara/CenturyLink Managed Storage-as-a-Service), in Taiwan connected to AWS Tokyo West via a CenturyLink 10G dedicated circuit. The data would be archived remotely to CenturyLink provisioned and managed AWS S3 storage and then ultimately moved to AWS Glacier for the long-term archive. The data movement from the local cache to AWS S3 would take place using Zadara’s Backup to Object Storage (B2OS) service.

One final challenge was the ability to move the massive amounts of data from the local storage in the Taiwan data center to the AWS Tokyo West S3 target. To accomplish this task, Zadara and CenturyLink leveraged local Docker container services within Zadara storage. Running the compression algorithms directly within the local storage allowed the compressed images to transfer to AWS S3 within the available bandwidth and time constraints.

The results.

Meeting performance targets. Adding 1PB each month.

The advanced solution provided by Zadara and CenturyLink was the only vendor option that sufficiently met both the customer’s technical and financial requirements. By combining the CenturyLink world-class on-site support and networking connectivity with the award-winning Zadara data services, CenturyLink’s customer was able to recognize many tangible benefits. The edge solution is capturing, analyzing and transmitting data at the required performance targets, and the archive continues to grow at the rate of about 1PB per month.

“CenturyLink and Zadara help solve customers’ challenging requirements by bringing together networking and data services in one comprehensive solution. We were thrilled to be able to resolve our customer’s challenges and we will continue to work with them as their dynamic needs change over time,” said CenturyLink Managed Services and Solutions Principal John Cecil.