Italy-based service provider Herabit has opted for Cubbit S3 distributed cloud storage in a move aimed at meeting demands for improved data sovereignty from its customer base.

The move will see the company use Cubbit’s DS3 Composer across three datacentres in northern Italy to provide backup, long-term data archiving and the creation of data lakes for artificial intelligence (AI) systems for Italian customers.

Herabit has around 5,000 customers for its voice and broadband services across sectors that include IT, banking, automotive and manufacturing.

Previously, it had used a mix of traditional on-premise object store and software-defined storage products, but had seen customer demand for S3 storage rise, while use of disparate systems had created management overheads, said Allesandro Aiello, general manager at Herabit.

“Our customers were asking for S3-compatible storage that could easily integrate into their existing stack without forcing them to challenge their processes,” said Aiello. “So at the same time, security, cost efficiency and flexibility were essential for us to stay competitive in the global storage market.”

Cubbit’s S3-based object storage is aimed at customers that want secure, resilient and sovereign storage for workloads that include backup and less-than-mission-critical workloads such as content delivery and collaboration.

DS3 Composer builds a peer-to-peer cloud built on customer nodes – physical or virtual – that act as a gateway and broker in a mesh with other customer nodes.

Minimum node deployment is three, which allows for data to be shared for resilience and security. Nodes can be on-site or in the cloud, although the latter is less cost-effective, and bare metal is the preferred option if a node is off-site.

Cubbit’s DS3 Composer allows for the delivery of cloud storage services up to 2PB (petabytes) of capacity in total across three locations.

Herabit had previously used Cubbit internally, which helped in its shift to using it for services to customers, said Aiello.

“In some cases, the lack of S3 compatibility hindered adoption as the market increased and customers shifted to S3,” said Aiello. “So given our positive experience with Cubbit, we felt confident in becoming a provider of this technology ourselves.”

A key attraction of Cubbit for Aiello is the ability to use it to provide services with guaranteed data sovereignty to Italian customers.

“This is the main problem, especially in the last two or three years. With the shifting geopolitical conditions, many customers want regional solutions to ensure full control and sovereignty of their data. Cubbit and Herabit are both 100% European technologies,” said Aiello.

“Data is encrypted and distributed across the local nodes so it stays entirely within Italy in our datacentre and over our network,” said Aiello. “This means low latency, high resilience, data sovereignty and competitive cost.

“As a result of the partnership that we are in with Cubbit, we are the preferred infrastructure partner in the Emilia-Romagna region. We can compete against even the hyperscalers thanks to this solution.”

Finally, Aiello said Herabit expects cost savings of up to 50% compared to other solutions, largely due to lower management overheads.

“Our expectation in terms of costs is that we expect to see cost savings of between 25% and 50% compared to equivalent configurations, depending on the workload profile and service tiers. We’re also seeing lower operational overheads, fewer touch points and faster provisioning.”

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