About Flexify.IO
Headquartered in the US, but with global operations, Flexify.IO is a leading multicloud storage provider. They offer a storage virtualization and data migration solution that helps companies realize their multicloud strategy by creating a cloud-agnostic storage layer on top of multiple cloud storage repositories and enabling flexible data migration across clouds.
Key Points
- Reduced cloud migration costs for customers by up to 80% using Megaport’s private connectivity to minimize egress fees.
- Increased the amount of data migrated by customers five-fold in the first full year of using Megaport services.
- Improved reliability and security of connectivity for easier, faster migrations.
Case Study Snapshot
Flexify.IO’s service makes multicloud migrations easier for customers. But when the high egress fees charged by cloud service providers made the total cost of migrations prohibitive for customers, Flexify.IO used Megaport’s private connectivity to lower prices by as much as 80%, and has increased the data customers migrated using Flexify.IO five-fold over the past year.
Challenges
Lowering egress fees
Flexify.IO’s customers move a lot of data–sometimes billions of objects–during cloud migrations. Last year alone, Flexify.IO migrated over 20 petabytes of data. Flexify.IO’s service is built to make multicloud easier, simplifying the complexity of multicloud migrations.
“All the end user has to do is add storage keys to Flexify and click ‘Migrate,’” said Sergey Kandaurov, Founder and CTO of Flexify.IO. “It’s super-simple. It takes less than a minute. They don’t need to figure out the links. They don’t need to figure out IP routing. They don’t need to figure out ASNs or virtual gateways. It’s already all figured out by Flexify. The customer just gets service out of the box and under the hood, we choose the most cost-effective way.”
But when data moves out of a cloud, particularly if the data traverses the public internet via a VPN tunnel, the cloud provider charges egress fees, and these monthly charges can add up quickly. In addition to these fees, performing cloud migrations over the public internet can be less reliable and less secure.
“When we run migrations, there are thousands of different possible paths,” said Kandaurov. “We can migrate between different regions–from US West to US East–or between multiple countries and different cloud providers. If you add all the combinations of all the regions and the cloud providers we support, it would be thousands of different directions and different paths of migration. Migrations also involve big amounts of traffic. The public internet is not designed for sending such amounts of data.”
“[Our customers] think it’s not possible to make migrations cheaper, or they think that the cheapest way will be to use some kind of explorer or write some kind of script. But in this case, it’s the hidden egress fees, which are twice as expensive as the all-included Flexify rate. Megaport helps us reduce those fees and we pass on those cost savings to the customer.”
Sergey Kandaurov, Founder and CTO of Flexify.IO
Benefits
50% cheaper per GB rates than cloud egress rates
Because Flexify.IO passes on cloud egress fees to their customers, those fees can make up a huge chunk of the total cost of migration for them. With private connectivity through Megaport, Flexify.IO’s all-included per GB rates on migrations are now 50% of the egress rates charged by some cloud providers.
“This is surprising for our customers,” Kandaurov said. “They think it’s not possible to make migrations cheaper, or they think that the cheapest way will be to use some kind of storage explorer or write some kind of script. But in this case, it’s the hidden egress fees, which are twice as expensive as the all-included Flexify.IO rate. Megaport helps us reduce those fees and we pass on those cost savings to the customer.”
Making multicloud storage feasible
Flexify.IO is also one of the leaders in multicloud storage. Its service allows businesses to combine data from multiple cloud providers into virtual buckets. When an application writes data to these virtual buckets, Flexify.IO can split the buckets and distribute them to multiple clouds, with the application seeing the data as a single set. Kandaurov expects at least 10% of storage in the next few years to use some form of multicloud because of its many advantages.
“You don’t have to depend on a single cloud provider,” Kandaurov pointed out. “You can choose to store your data in the cloud that is cheapest, because pricing always changes. When you move data between clouds, it’s transparent to the applications so you don’t even have to plan for such migrations, because all the URLs and all the objects remain the same. You can have zero-downtime migrations.”
But Kandaurov says that the biggest inhibitor to greater adoption of multicloud storage is cloud egress fees. Thanks to Megaport’s private connectivity, Flexify.IO can make multicloud storage much more feasible for customers.
“Megaport is unique,” said Kandaurov. “It makes it possible for us to offer our service at a lower price.”