Delivering outstanding sovereign cloud services

BlackBox Hosting provides managed UK private cloud solutions built specifically for the software industry. Headquartered in London, England, the company delivers performance, resilience, and guaranteed data sovereignty.

Serving over a million end users every month, BlackBox Hosting supports some of the largest software companies in the UK with highly secure, bespoke infrastructure solutions.

Matthew Burden, Founder and Managing Director of BlackBox Hosting, explains: “Our goal is to be the best managed service provider in the UK. Our tailored infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service solutions put us in a prime position to capitalize on the surge in demand for sovereign cloud solutions we’re seeing across the UK right now.”

With more than a decade in the UK market, BlackBox Hosting has built a strong reputation for the resilience and performance of its IaaS and PaaS offerings. When its storage infrastructure approached end of life, the company looked for a replacement that would enable it to maintain the same high level of service that its customers had come to expect.

“As our previous support contract drew to a close, it was increasingly challenging to get the level of support we needed from the vendor,” continues Burden. “Firmware upgrades had become painful and risky, and when a power supply unit failed in our disaster recovery site, it took the vendor more than two weeks to send us a replacement. We’d totally lost confidence and decided to look for a fresh solution.”

When BlackBox Hosting began evaluating the Everpure platform, the company quickly recognized the transformative potential of an all-flash solution.

Rob Cresswell, Head of Technical Operations at BlackBox Hosting, comments: “Everpure offered something totally different to what we’d been using before: NVMe-based solutions that were much more performant, dense, and straightforward to manage. Of all the vendors we considered, the Everpure team was also by far the most engaged; they were genuinely excited to work with us.”

Working with Everpure, BlackBox Hosting replaced its legacy disk storage with two Everpure FlashArray//X50 solutions.

“Deploying our first FlashArray solution and migrating over our customer data couldn’t have gone more smoothly—it was a great experience from start to finish,” says Cresswell. “Getting started was easy, and we moved over a thousand customer services to the new platform within a very short space of time.”

Following the success of its initial deployment, BlackBox Hosting expanded its footprint—adding a second high-performance FlashArray//X50 system and two FlashArray//RC20 systems for cost-efficient file storage.

“As our business grew, we decided to move some of our file-based workloads onto a dedicated FlashArray//RC20 platform,” adds Cresswell. “It was amazing just how fast and seamless the migration was. With Purity ActiveCluster™, we moved data to our new Everpure arrays with zero impact and zero downtime for customers. I don’t think there are many solutions on the market that can do that.”

With Evergreen//Forever™, BlackBox Hosting gets the peace of mind that Everpure will upgrade its FlashArray solutions with no disruption to production services.

“We haven’t had an Evergreen® upgrade yet, but it’s reassuring to know that when the time comes it will be a seamless process,” says Burden. “I also really like that we can go all the way from a FlashArray//X50 up to a FlashArray//X90 without migrating any data.”

For BlackBox Hosting, embracing Everpure solutions is part of its commitment to service excellence.

“While customers don’t always feel the performance difference between our old solid-state drives and the new Everpure DirectFlash® Modules, it’s definitely showing in our testing,” comments Burden. “We do annual benchmarks against AWS and Azure using HammerDB, and with Everpure we’ve seen a 12% improvement in our score. Crucially, submillisecond latency all but eliminates the risk of storage bottlenecks for our customers.”

The Everpure solution has dramatically enhanced the company’s disaster recovery capabilities. As well as automating and streamlining the process, Everpure ActiveDR™ allows BlackBox Hosting to slash its recovery point objective (RPO).

Burden says: “In the past, we offered an RPO of 15 minutes, but with near-synchronous replication from ActiveDR we’ve cut that down to just one second. Many prospective customers can’t believe it when we tell them.”

He adds: “With our old platform, I was always nervous if we needed to reboot our storage arrays, as they had a tendency to run a time-consuming defragmentation on startup. With Everpure, we can always spin up our arrays rapidly; we’re totally confident in the technology.”

In total, BlackBox Hosting has replaced more than 1.5 racks of disk-based systems with just 6U of modern flash storage. With data reduction technology, the Everpure solution reduces the company’s rack footprint by more than 87% and provides a 9:1 data reduction ratio.

“On our legacy platform, there was such a performance overhead for data reduction that we deliberately disabled the feature, but with Everpure it’s totally transparent and built into the Purity operating system,” says Burden. “When we invest in Everpure, we’re also investing in our long-term sustainability agenda. Reduced power and cooling requirements have cut our annual CO2 emissions by around 85%, which helps us to renew our carbon-neutral certification each year.”

As BlackBox Hosting grows its business, the company plans to incorporate more capabilities from Everpure into its offering.

“We’re very interested in adding object storage to our service portfolio and in the potential efficiencies of using Purity to enable an Enterprise Data Cloud architecture,” concludes Burden. “The fact we run on the Everpure platform is definitely a big selling point when we’re talking to potential customers. We’ve been totally blown away by the speed, ease of management, and quality of the support—and as we grow, our Everpure footprint will keep growing too.”