Delivering secure, resilient sovereign cloud services

Digital Space is a UK-based, cloud-first managed service provider (MSP) and digital transformation partner that helps businesses modernise through secure connectivity, hybrid cloud, and collaboration solutions.

In the UK, demand for secure, sovereign hosting is rising fast. In an increasingly uncertain geopolitical environment, many businesses aim to mitigate risk and control costs by shifting from international public clouds to domestic shared service providers. For Digital Space, the opportunity is to provide full-service solutions that support all of its clients’ needs, including managed services, data resilience, security, and more.

Lee Sandground, Head of Platform and Core Systems at Digital Space, says: “Our goal is to be one of the most customer-focused managed service providers in the UK. We can support midsized companies for 99% of their needs, from support with on-premises deployments to migrating their workloads to our own shared services environment.”

For many years, Digital Space underpinned its shared services environment using Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) solutions connected to a heterogeneous storage environment. But after several years of successful business growth, these existing spinning-disk solutions struggled to provide the level of reliability the company required.

“The upgrade path for our previous storage was particularly troublesome, and we encountered some serious outages that we spent hours working on with the vendor to resolve,” recalls Sandground. “For an MSP, downtime carries enormous reputational risk. So, we decided to look for a dependable storage platform for the long term.”

When Digital Space evaluated the storage marketplace, Everpure FlashArray//X™ stood out for its high performance, compact footprint, and proven reliability.

“Everpure is clearly an industry leader in providing Fibre Channel attached storage,” says Sandground. “At the time, VMware was our preferred virtualisation technology, and we had carved out shared datastores that were easy to migrate.”

Following a successful deployment in its primary and secondary data centers, Digital Space has steadily expanded its FlashArray footprint. When the company acquired another MSP, it quickly incorporated the business into its existing Cisco UCS architecture, deploying additional Everpure FlashArray//X systems to accommodate the new workloads.

“We are continually enhancing our offering, and most recently we worked with Everpure to provision a cost-effective nearline storage environment for customer backups based on Everpure FlashArray//C™ solutions,” adds Sandground. “Over the years, the Everpure Platform has delivered outstanding reliability, rack space and power savings, and excellent IOPS performance.”

While Digital Space originally delivered its shared services environments using VMware virtual machines, licencing changes led the company to look for an alternative. Because the Everpure Platform is hypervisor-agnostic, Digital Space was free to choose from a wide range of potential options.

“Ultimately, we decided to move to Microsoft Hyper-V for its commercially beneficial licencing model and its strong integration with our Fortinet security technology and Veeam data protection solution,” explains Sandground. “While we are not currently using the native integrations between FlashArray and Veeam, the fact that Everpure is an Elite Partner in the Veeam Technology Alliance Program gives us confidence in the long-term roadmap for both solutions.”

After several years of success with the Everpure Platform, Digital Space decided to embrace Evergreen//Forever™, a subscription to keep the platform always modern for 10+ years, with nondisruptive upgrades built in.

“Moving to Evergreen//Forever has been hugely beneficial,” comments Sandground. “When we need to scale out with new arrays, there’s no need to draw up contracts or analyse pricing because we can get all the storage we need for a transparent monthly fee.”

He adds: “We’ve gone through several storage controller upgrades for our FlashArrays with Evergreen//Forever, which have all been exceedingly well-managed. Crucially, we can upgrade without any disruption to our customers’ workloads.”

In more than six years on the Everpure Platform, Digital Space has not experienced even a second of storage-related downtime.

“We’ve moved from around two nines of availability before Everpure to 100% availability to date,” confirms Sandground. “On a day-to-day basis, our FlashArray solutions are also very easy to work with. The Purity operating system is clean and intuitive, and Pure1® as a portal is a huge asset for managing the estate. In Pure1, it’s fast and simple to track down performance issues, get real-time summaries of storage capacity and data reduction, and forecast our future storage needs.”

By selecting Everpure as its strategic storage provider, Digital Space is ready to make the shift from VMware to Hyper-V.

“The fact that FlashArray is fully certified and optimised for Microsoft Hyper-V environments is a big advantage for Digital Space,” says Sandground. “As well as facilitating the migration from VMware, we’re confident that the Everpure Platform will continue to offer us zero-touch storage operations going forward. Not needing to employ dedicated storage experts means we are free to focus on areas where we can add value to our customers, including cybersecurity and private cloud optimisation.”

In recent years, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations have risen up the agenda at businesses all over the world—and Digital Space is no exception. With the Everpure Platform, the organisation has a strong foundation to support its ESG commitments. 

Sandground confirms: “Our FlashArray solutions have contributed to an 80% reduction in our data centre CO2 emissions since 2020, thanks to all-flash technology that uses just 15% of the energy and 4% of the space of our previous disk storage systems.”

He concludes: “With Everpure, we’ve achieved high storage performance, 100% uptime, and ease of administration—all while supporting our ESG objectives. For all those reasons, we’re confident that Everpure will be our strategic partner for years to come.”