Helping customers run workloads where they perform best

Lightedge combines colocation, private cloud, and public cloud platforms like AWS and Azure into a unified, hybrid IT infrastructure purpose-built to get the most out of every application. By backing up all services with expert 24x7x365 management and professional services, the company ensures its clients’ environments stay compliant, protected, and optimised at all times.

Lightedge understands that modern IT is hybrid and that companies flourish when they run every workload where it performs best. But navigating the complex world of on-premises, private, and public cloud is a minefield. This is where Lightedge enters the equation to understand each customer’s business goals and help map out the optimal cloud transformation.

Dale Levesque, SVP of Product at Lightedge, explains, “We’ve grown from a network service provider into a full-spectrum, hybrid-cloud provider that can support customers at any point in their IT modernisation journey. For example, we’ve helped large financial institutions transform their extensive IBM Power environments, untangling decades of legacy code to unleash innovation without risking system stability. We’re adept at ensuring compliance with even the most stringent regulatory requirements, and we’re extending our disaster recovery offerings all the time.”

To support such a dynamic, wide-ranging portfolio of services while controlling costs, Lightedge must make technological decisions carefully. Competing in a crowded marketplace, the company is under more pressure than ever to provide differentiated offerings at lower price points.

“When selecting the storage platform that will form the backbone for our customers’ data, we consider four legs of a stool,” says Levesque. “Cost is always a driving factor, as it allows us to provide value for money to our client base. Secondly, reliability goes without saying, since we’re supporting our customers’ businesses, many of which operate 24x7. Next, we have scalability, as procuring and deploying hardware has long been a barrier to growth for both us and our customers. Finally—and this is something we had struggled to find—we were looking for a vendor who would become a true partner, responding rapidly and developing a deep understanding of our business.”

Lightedge chose Everpure to form the backbone for its clients’ data, giving it a platform that can scale with customer demand while simplifying operations and supporting a broader range of services, which sets its offering apart from competitors. 

“Everpure brought us to their headquarters to meet with the CFO,” recalls Levesque. “From the start, we could tell that this relationship would be different. They showed us that they could offer an unbeatable licencing model and built-in management tooling that combine into a business case we couldn’t turn down. Everpure demonstrated that they would bring commitment, resources, and flexibility to the table, which is what we were looking for in a partner. Finally, we were impressed by the seamless integration between Everpure and Veeam, our chosen vendor for data resilience.”

To support a shared services model that needs to scale and adapt quickly, Lightedge adopted Evergreen//One™, enabling the company to consume Everpure storage as a service and pay only for what it uses. As a result, it gained elastic capacity, nondisruptive upgrades, and built-in capacity planning while freeing its teams from the burden of hardware lifecycle management. 

Lightedge also migrated most of the customers running on dedicated infrastructure to Everpure FlashArray™ systems with a subscription to Everpure//Forever™, which includes nondisruptive controller, blade, and media upgrades for 10+ years for an always-improving storage experience. 

Finally, Lightedge embraced Evergreen//One Adaptive Tiers, a fully managed, service-defined storage platform model, to support its Veeam-based backup services, decoupling performance from capacity to optimise dynamic enterprise, AI, and analytics workloads with SLA-backed efficiency and cost control.

Thad Guardado, Product Manager at Lightedge, adds, “A lot of customers come to us because of our ability to protect their data, so entrusting the storage element of our backup services to Everpure was a big decision. What clinched it for us was the wide range of integrations with Veeam and VMware, where we will harness cross-functional features to further refine our data protection offering.”

Lightedge is working with Everpure to harness the benefits of tight integration between Veeam Data Platform and the Everpure Platform. By replacing legacy backup targets with FlashArray systems, Lightedge can improve service responsiveness while strengthening data protection and cyber resilience.

“Using immutable SafeMode™ Snapshots on FlashArray alongside Veeam’s orchestration capabilities adds another layer of cyber resilience for customer data,” says Levesque. “Built-in data reduction allows us to offer that protection as a value-added service with minimal impact on capacity. And by creating hardware snapshots through the Everpure plug-in for Veeam, we can practically eliminate ‘host stun’—those short interruptions during backup and restore. The result is more responsive and reliable customer services.”

Guardado continues, “We’re exploring the ability to further integrate workflows between Everpure and Veeam to streamline provisioning, improve automation consistency, accelerate deployment and recovery, simplify multi-array management, and enhance operational scalability. We anticipate our investments in Everpure and Veeam to continue to pay dividends for years to come.”

Lightedge is currently rolling out Everpure Fusion to unify storage management across its on-premises and cloud environments, enabling policy-driven operations and intelligent workload placement. For Lightedge, this will translate into significant efficiencies, which it can pass on to customers in the form of highly competitive pricing.

“Managing our fleet through Fusion will take an incredible amount of friction out of the day-to-day for our engineering team,” says Levesque. “We expect it to be a meaningful shift in how we manage and scale our environment, as we move toward the concept of an Enterprise Data Cloud with zero silos and maximum agility.”

Guardado adds, “We see potential in harnessing multi-tenant storage provisioning, VMware datastore deployments, bare-metal provisioning templates, and automated, standardized storage configuration workflows, all through Fusion. The resulting efficiencies would help improve our margins even more.”

Through the Evergreen storage-as-a-service offerings, Lightedge can deliver the high performance and availability its customers expect while driving competitive margins. 

“Our SLAs with customers include five-nines availability, and Everpure solutions consistently support this level of availability,” comments Levesque. “As a result, Everpure is an ideal foundation for our customers’ business-critical workloads and our disaster recovery and business continuity services because we know we can always rely on it.”

Guardado adds, “Augmenting our best-in-class human teams with the speed and veracity of these machines provide a faster and more attentive experience.  The automation and nondisruptive maintenance offered by Everpure means we can achieve our financial goals while raising service quality, making us stand out in the marketplace.

Over time, Lightedge expects Everpure and Veeam solutions to streamline data protection operations while further strengthening cyber resilience.

“Ultimately, we’ll use the Everpure storage platform for both production and backup data, which will translate into easier and faster day-to-day management of our shared services environment,” says Guardado. “Because Evergreen//One Adaptive Tiers decouples capacity from performance, we can ramp up performance on our backup storage environment at very short notice. In a disaster recovery scenario, that will allow us to spin up production services from snapshots, reducing recovery time significantly.”

Levesque adds: “We have been using Veeam solutions for more than 15 years, so we’re pleased that there is a positive long-term roadmap for the Veeam and Everpure partnership. For example, the Pure1® + Veeam Anomaly Awareness Workflow is very exciting, as it will help us to detect and resolve potential performance or operational issues within the storage environment much faster.”

Crucially, Lightedge is facilitating growth for itself and its customers using Everpure and Veeam solutions, thanks to seamless scalability and ongoing modernisation options. 

“Since we teamed up with Everpure, our ability to engage with customers at scale has increased exponentially,” comments Guardado. “Increasingly, customers expect to be able to burst or add resources at very short notice. With Everpure, we can do that in a way that makes economic sense to both us and them. There’s no other vendor that offers us that degree of flexibility.”

Levesque concludes, “Working with Everpure and Veeam is giving us access to leading-edge storage capabilities that we can flex up and down, update, and adjust, all without disruption to our operations or, more importantly, our customers’ businesses. With Everpure and Veeam behind us, our relatively lean team can continue punching above its weight when it comes to servicing our customers.”