How Cloud Storage is Used by Good Eats, Toyota Mapmaster, Sheppard Mullin, State of Utah, and Roblox: Case Studies

Cloud storage is a service model that transmits and stores data and files in off-site, remote storage locations.

By engaging the services provided by cloud storage vendors, enterprises are able to reduce TCO (total cost of ownership); accelerate time to deployment; keep information safe from data breaches and other security threats; and scale storage as needed without the need for investment in infrastructure, while making data accessible to remote locations and applications.

The following five case studies show how companies from a variety of industries have used cloud storage solutions to support their business needs.

1. Good Eats

Fans of the Food Network will be familiar with host Alton Brown and his hit TV show, Good Eats. After being off the air since 2012, Brown decided to reboot the show with fresh episodes to air on the Cooking Channel. After looking to update prior classic episodes, Brown’s team discovered that footage had been stored on deteriorating tape media.

After seeing the tedious process to retrieve data and the degrading quality of the footage, Brown and his team were concerned. They needed a better solution that included real-time backup and archiving functionality. So, Eric Bigman, head of post-production and editor of Good Eats: Reloaded, decided to use Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

With a critical need for instant access to stored data during filming, production team members located across the United States, Bigman gained confidence in Backblaze’s cloud storage solution after seeing virtually zero upload failures and seamless workflows, while remaining cost-effective.

“It was the biggest quality of life improvement I could have hoped for,” Bigman says.

Industry: Media and entertainment

Cloud storage solutions: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

Outcomes:

• The team was able to keep all working files for reference by future production teams.
• 100x time savings was achieved in managing backups and archiving.

2. Sheppard Mullin

As an international law firm with over 950 attorneys, Sheppard Mullin has offices located in North America, Europe, and Asia. Understanding that team members spend considerable time editing, reading, and writing legal documents, the performance of file storage systems directly impacts their ability to effectively serve clients.

When the time came to update IT infrastructure, Sheppard Mullin looked to cloud storage to deliver 100% availability with high performance.

To address these needs, Sheppard Mullin turned to cloud storage provided by Nutanix. With the ease of centralized setup and management, Nutanix gives Sheppard Mullin scalable and reliable access to an enterprise grade file server.

“Nutanix is providing near 100% uptime, enabling us to more easily meet our SLAs,” says Lawrence Lozzano, senior DBA at Sheppard Mullin.

“With Nutanix, our attorneys can be more efficient with their caseloads, providing better service to all of our global clients.”

Industry: Law

Cloud storage solutions: Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Systems

Outcomes:

• Improved system updating
• Increased system performance that is never an issue for applications
• Higher attorney productivity and additional client satisfaction
• Better service and accessibility for team members across the globe
• Less additional IT involvement with self-service restores

3. Toyota Mapmaster

Toyota brand car navigation systems are powered by the mobility information infrastructure provider, Mapmaster. The advanced map databases used by Toyota Mapmaster are relied upon to be highly precise, providing details for intersections, buildings, facilities, and topographical changes.

During an IT infrastructure refresh, Toyota Mapmaster engaged HPE GreenLake as part of a private cloud storage solution housed in their own data center, despite hardware assets remaining owned by HPE. HPE Greenlake offered a scalable, pay-as-you-go, consumption-based solution that respects the investments already made by Toyota Mapmaster.

“The benefits of being able to optimize infrastructure investment according to business growth while maintaining the security of our data center is equivalent to the benefits of the public cloud,” says Tomoaki Kato, senior manager of technical development, Toyota Mapmaster.

Industry: Automotive

Cloud storage solutions: HPE GreenLake

Outcomes:

• Reduced heavy-load batch processing from five hours to one hour
• Reduced daily database replication to one-third
• Significantly reduced data center rack footprint and power cost
• Accelerated large-scale inspection process and data copy tasks

4. State of Utah

Armed with the responsibility for providing storage services to all state government agencies, the State of Utah needed a solution that offered scalable capacity for data backups that would be compatible with their existing backup-as-a-service solution, Rubrik.

After unsuccessfully trying to use existing storage solutions procured from another vendor, the State of Utah turned to Cloudian. Initial implementation gave the State of Utah 1.4 petabytes (PB) of capacity across 12 Cloudian appliances, but it flawlessly expanded to 2.8PB on 24 nodes after six months without any degradation in performance.

Industry: Government

Cloud storage solutions: Cloudian

Outcomes:

• Efficient data protection
• Archive storage at 10% the cost of existing NAS (network-attached storage) and SAN (storage area network)

5. Roblox

Gaming fans of all ages use the Roblox platform to play, socialize, and connect with tens of millions of people. Record-breaking growth, combined with the high-expectations from users, translated into the need for a storage strategy that would support high-performance and high-availability in the face of tremendous and often unpredictable growth.

“Roblox is a fast-growing company, but we don’t have an infinite number of people to work on storage, so we look to leverage partners in certain areas where it makes the most sense,” says Rob Cameron, senior technical director, Roblox.

Cameron and his team chose the Portworx Enterprise cloud storage solution. Delighted that storage provisioning no longer requires complex configuration, Roblox is able to invest more into their platform, saving costs that allow the company to hire more developers.

Industry: Gaming

Cloud storage solutions: Portworx Enterprise by Pure Storage

Outcomes:

• Support record-breaking growth during the pandemic
• Keep millions of games online for tens of millions of users
• Development cluster setup in two hours
• Gaming platform capacity scaled in days instead of weeks 
• Team can focus on improving player experience instead of IT infrastructure support