Delivering revolutionary storage services

Australia’s largest IPFS cloud storage provider uses Lenovo Truscale Infrastructure-as-Service to boost capacity and customer base.

Distributed Storage Solutions (DSS) is Australia’s largest provider of storage services for Filecoin – a decentralized cloud storage network developed on Interplanetary File System (IPFS) protocol with more than 14EB of committed capacity. IPFS is a protocol, hypermedia and file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system.

Filecoin is a Blockchain-based cloud storage application, offering users an immutable record (cryptographic proof) of their data’s location and integrity. Filecoin allows users to store data at hyper competitive prices, with enterprise storage providers such as DSS, attracting customers based on their storage capacity, reliability and speed.

Users’ data can be managed in several ways at their discretion. This includes replication in geographically diverse locations and/or distribution of a single dataset across multiple nodes on the network – resulting in no single point of failure.

These features make Filecoin an attractive alternative to traditional cloud storage services, especially for organizations with large storage needs and limited budgets. DSS sees this reflected in its own client base, made up of largely higher education, medical research, public sector and independent research organizations.

Running a successful storage provisioning operation on Filecoin has high hardware demands. DSS needs to support computationally intense operations and provide fast, high-performance and large-capacity storage. As DSS competes with hyperscale cloud providers for enterprise storage customers, the ability to guarantee reliable performance is key to success.

As DSS set out to establish itself as a trusted Filecoin storage provider, it needed a technology partner capable of delivering enterprise-grade data management solutions that met multiple requirements. The infrastructure needed to perform under the high demands of customer workloads and scale to multiple PBs per system, while remaining easy to monitor, maintain and manage.

As a start-up, DSS also needed to carefully consider the economics of procuring this hardware. The company was keen to find a flexible commercial model that would allow it to establish a high-performing infrastructure while avoiding large up-front costs.

DSS assessed infrastructure options from several vendors, including Lenovo. Lenovo’s Thinksystem DE Series Storage proposal offered higher redundancy, higher availability and faster drive rebuild times. What’s more, Lenovo offered faster delivery than competitors during the supply chain crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Lenovo put in a lot of work to plan supply forecasts and line up their delivery schedule with our growth cycle,” said Andrew Leece, CEO of DSS. “It showed us they were serious about getting us the hardware we needed, when we needed it.”

One of the most important deciding factors was Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), which gives DSS access to top-of-the-line Lenovo hardware through a pay-as-you-go model with minimal initial investment. There’s no need for large upfront investment and DSS only pays for the infrastructure resources it actually uses, with predictable and easy-to-understand pricing.

Working closely with a team from Lenovo, DSS procured and deployed Lenovo ThinkSystem DE6000H Hybrid Storage Arrays including Lenovo Essential Services, which provides DSS with up to four-hour on-site support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This offering also includes YourDrive Your Data, which allows DSS to retain possession and dispose of failed drives – which otherwise must be returned to Lenovo upon replacement.

DSS also benefits from a dedicated Lenovo customer success manager for the lifecycle of the project. The customer success manager helps with onboarding, internal escalations, health checks, future growth projects and the potential renewal process.

Thanks to the seamless agility and scalability of Lenovo TruScale, DSS has established a fast-paced expansion schedule, regularly adding new ThinkSystem DE6000H arrays to its environment to support ever-rising storage needs.

With Lenovo TruScale IaaS, DSS gets the best of both worlds: access to enterprise-grade hardware that delivers on the huge performance and capacity demands of Filecoin storage, wrapped up in a transparent and predictable pay-as-you-go commercial model that optimizes cash flow.

Opting for an IaaS solution also means that DSS is free to focus on growing its business and can leave hardware procurement, deployment and maintenance safely in Lenovo’s hands.

The company expects Lenovo to be a crucial enabler for its ambitious expansion plans. Backed by Lenovo TruScale, the company can easily scale storage capacity in line with actual business needs – keeping DSS on the path to profitable growth.

Manu Mehra, Managing Director – Australia and New Zealand, Lenovo ISG, said: “DSS is the right example of how consumption-based models like Lenovo TruScale can help keep costs in check, become agile and future-proof the business. We firmly believe that our customer’s success is our success. Therefore, we prioritize cost-effectiveness and work towards ensuring that our supply chain is efficient and reliable to support their needs. Through our consistent efforts, we have been able to bring our supply chain back to pre-pandemic levels. This enables us to support any scale of business with end-to-end infrastructure requirements quickly and efficiently.”