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Kodak Alaris reduces costs, adapts to changing demands.

Using Zadara’s enterprise storage-as-a-service, Kodak Alaris benefits from cost control, agility, and investment protection.

About the company.

Kodak Alaris markets traditional photographic supplies, hardware and software for digital imaging and information management, and retail printing kiosks.

The challenge.

Kodak Alaris is a spin-off from the Eastman Kodak Company. The company, in the current form, has been in existence since 2013 and views itself as an independent, global technology company, which addresses both the B2C and B2B markets and large retailers worldwide. In total, the company has over 3,000 employees in 34 countries.

Kodak Alaris seeks a partner to help it meet demand.

The imaging business is characterized by a variety of specific demands. These include a high degree of seasonality, primarily at Christmas time, fast processing times, high availability and non-foreseeable but regular changes in order volume due to promotions or customer churn. This means that the demands on the storage backbone also change, particularly in terms of capacity requirements. In addition to scalability, both upwards and downwards, 24/7 availability is an absolute must-have, in order to meet the customer needs of the various time zones. All these factors led Kodak Alaris to look for a new storage solution which was able to fulfill all of these requirements.

“The most important reasons to deploy a new storage solution were costs on the one hand, and high availability and integration with other cloud services on the other. We wanted a solution which could be easily adapted to changing demand, and therefore, allow us to pay according to actual capacity usage per month – instead of being tied to inflexible fixed rates,” explains Hans-Martin Otto, worldwide operations manager KDFS, Kodak Alaris.

The solution.
Flexibility to react quickly to changing needs.

Kodak Alaris chose Zadara storage-as-a-service. The company tested a wide range of on-premises solutions as well as other cloud services such as Microsoft Azure. The team’s main goals were to be able to react quickly and flexibly to changing needs, simplify management, reduce operational expenditure, adhere to security and compliance regulations and to implement a common technology platform.

Additional criteria were fast implementation, compatibility with existing cloud partners and a simple path of migration. Only Zadara was able to fulfill all these demands. “Global availability, cloud as the fundamental technology and connections to the most important cloud players were further important factors,” explained Otto.

The Kodak Alaris decision makers were impressed with Zadara’s innovative technology, the flexible billing and payment model, and the competitive pricing. In addition, Zadara can be connected to and integrated with Kodak Alaris’s preferred cloud solutions, meaning investment protection and ease-of-use. Zadara was also able to meet Kodak Alaris’s global demands as all data worldwide is centralized within the Zadara Cloud. Zadara also has a global presence which means Kodak Alaris is able to contact support at any time.

Zadara allows us to adapt quickly and flexibly to changing needs. We are impressed by Zadara’s high availability and low administrative overhead, the fast and competent support and the transparent billing.
Hans-Martin Otto
WW Operations Manager KDFS | Kodak Alaris
The results.
At-rest and in-flight encryption.

The storage solution primarily stores image files and personal customer data such as name and address, which are necessary to fulfill orders. Therefore, Zadara’s at-rest and in-flight encryption capabilities, as well as the fact that Kodak Alaris owns the encryption keys, were very important to the team. Kodak Alaris was also impressed to see that the performance for accessing the data stored in the Zadara Cloud was comparable with that of an on-premises system.

“We now use the Zadara services for the transfer and long-term storage of our digital photo orders. Zadara allows us to adapt quickly to changing capacity needs. The new solution also has lower operational costs and allows us to react to specific compliance requirements”, says Hans-Martin Otto.