Open Line builds sovereign cloud success

Based in the Netherlands, Open Line, part of Conscia, is a leading managed services provider (MSP) specializing in the healthcare, government, housing, and logistics sectors.

Across Europe, demand for sovereign cloud solutions has never been greater. Organizations across both public and private sectors are increasingly looking to reduce risk and cost by moving away from hyperscaler platforms to providers that can give assurances that data never leaves their national borders.

Since it was founded in 2002, Open Line has grown into a major player in the sovereign cloud market. With deep experience delivering solutions for highly regulated industries, Open Line hosts sensitive systems and data for its clients.

Marcel Huijten, Lead Architect at Open Line, elaborates: “We were recently acquired by Conscia, a leading provider of cybersecurity and networking solutions for mission-critical IT infrastructure in large European organizations. As part of Conscia, our goal is now to bring the same high standards of compliance, resilience, and managed service excellence we’ve cultivated in the Netherlands to clients across Europe.”

With fast-paced business growth on the horizon, Open Line needs to scale quickly, effectively, and securely at very short notice. For more than six years, the company has relied on Everpure to deliver these capabilities for its clients’ mission-critical workloads.

“Before we worked with Everpure, we were using a traditional storage architecture that was not designed for the level of growth, flexibility, and speed that organizations now expect as standard,” comments Huijten. “As workloads expanded and became more diverse, our storage platform struggled to keep pace with the performance demands and lacked the agility to scale rapidly.”

For Open Line, finding a data platform provider that could support a modern, high-performance MSP environment was key. The company targeted true cloud readiness, strong integration with its preferred automation frameworks, predictable performance at scale, and a clear roadmap for long-term innovation.

“Everpure impressed us greatly both from a technical and commercial perspective,” recalls Huijten. “Back then, Everpure was the new kid on the block, offering something totally different—and much, much better—than the legacy storage architectures we were used to.”

He continues: “The ability to consume storage as a service through Evergreen//One™ was a game changer. Instead of guessing at our future capacity needs and immediately losing around half of our investment in raw storage on RAID configurations, Evergreen//One gives us transparent and predictable pricing per terabyte, which reduces our storage costs significantly, while enabling us to be more flexible and deliver more complete storage offerings. When we considered the added benefits of nondisruptive upgrades, Everpure became the clear choice.”

After starting with a small-scale FlashArray//X™ deployment to validate the performance, resilience, and operational simplicity of the platform, Open Line quickly embraced Everpure as its strategic storage partner.

“Over the many years we’ve worked with Everpure, they’ve always gone out of their way to help us to find the best solutions to help us achieve our business goals,” says Huijten. “At the start of our journey, we used FlashArray//X to build a strong, high-performance foundation for our most demanding workloads. By augmenting our environment with FlashArray//C™ arrays, we were able to scale efficiently without increasing operational complexity. Most recently, we’ve harnessed FlashBlade//E™ arrays to deliver highly robust data protection and cyber resilience capabilities for our clients. Everpure even enables us to compete with hyperscaler storage offerings.”

Everpure solutions are now at the heart of Open Line’s offering, empowering the company to deliver round-the-clock access to mission-critical data services.

The company’s clients include some of the largest radiotherapy centers in the Netherlands. To drive high-quality patient outcomes, clinicians continuously optimize radiation treatments by digitally analyzing medical images in near-real time. Open Line provides an integrated and scalable platform to support these vital capabilities, as well as integrated cloud backup services.

Open Line also deploys 24x7 data center infrastructure and data resilience solutions to clients in other industries, including one of the biggest logistics companies in the Netherlands. Today, Open Line handles server management for its operations in the Netherlands, enabling the company to focus on its core competencies and support millions of logistics planning transactions per day.

Huijten comments: “As an MSP, we operate large, mixed workloads where predictable performance is essential for delivering responsive services to our clients. At the same time, our private cloud must run with extremely high availability because any disruption affects multiple organizations that rely on us for business-critical services. Resilient solutions and nondisruptive upgrades from Everpure give us the high levels of availability our clients need.”

By building on the Everpure platform, Open Line has cut day-to-day storage management effort—helping to support rapid business growth.

“Before we worked with Everpure, our environment was much smaller,” says Huijten. “Today, the same lean team manages a data footprint that’s vastly bigger. Even though our data volumes are growing by around 17% a year, we’re confident that Everpure is going to help us keep our IT management staffing flat for at least the next two years, and perhaps even longer than that.”

With seamless scalability, nondisruptive upgrades, and AI-powered management capabilities from Pure1®, Open Line is free to focus on delivering value-added services for its clients.

With its MSP operations on a resilient and high-performance platform from Everpure, Open Line has reduced storage latency even as its client base—and data volumes—grow.

“Our FlashArray™ solutions consistently deliver low response times, which directly improves application responsiveness across our private cloud,” says Huijten. “We’ve also recently combined Veeam and Everpure technology to create a brand new data resilience solution for our clients. With S3 object storage on FlashBlade//E arrays, we can deliver the bandwidth, scale, and resilience to protect large data sets for our clients.”

Open Line has the peace of mind that each new service it launches is backed by a modern, resilient, and future-proof storage foundation that will grow with its clients’ needs.

“Everpure is the perfect fit for an MSP like Open Line,” says Huijten. “They offer everything from small block arrays to large, fast S3 storage—and you can start small with a single box and scale out those workloads cost-effectively as you grow. Equally important is the quality of Everpure services. Whenever we’ve had critical incidents, the team has mobilized immediately to solve them. Everpure consultants work as if they are part of our own team; accessible, knowledgeable, and fully invested in our success.”

Crucially, Open Line knows it can count on the Everpure platform to deliver high availability for mission-critical data services.

“Since we’ve been with Everpure, we’ve continually enhanced and accelerated our backup and disaster recovery capabilities,” adds Huijten. “Because we serve clients in highly regulated industries, robust information security and governance are essential. With synchronous replication from ActiveCluster™ and immutable SafeMode™ Snapshots, we can demonstrate our compliance with European Union requirements such as NIS2 [Network Information Security Directive] and DORA [Digital Operational Resilience Act].”

In the years ahead, Open Line sees a major opportunity to unlock further operational efficiencies by working with Everpure to create an Enterprise Data Cloud (EDC). Managing data through Fusion, an intelligent control plane within the Everpure platform, will give Open Line the policy-driven foundation it needs to unify data management, reduce complexity, accelerate analytics and AI initiatives, simplify compliance, and orchestrate all its storage resources as a single data cloud.

“We are very interested in exploring ways to harness Fusion as the foundational control plane for an EDC, transforming distributed storage infrastructure into a unified, policy-driven data platform that enables consistent, automated, and scalable data services,” concludes Huijten. “Combining Fusion with our custom-built data center automation platform will let us accomplish even more with even less, which will be a crucial capability as we kick-start our international growth.”