Spectra StorCycle™ – Corporate IT department manages exponential data

Overview:

Economics and performance objectives guarantee that most mid- and enterprise-sized IT departments manage data in a hybrid configuration with several types of storage. The corporate IT group in question establishes, monitors and maintains information technology systems and services for a midsize corporation. As the amount of data they manage increases at a compounded annual rate, they think they could save money by curbing the sprawl of their primary storage by considering a solution that can help automatically tier their data to lower cost repositories.

“We were especially concerned with the compounded annual growth rate of our data – we couldn’t afford to continuously buy more high-performance disk, and we didn’t need to. StorCycle automatically identifies and moves inactive data off of our primary storage, seamlessly extending user access to a lower cost, scalable tier.”

– System administrator at corporate IT department

Problem:

This corporate IT department presently manages 600TB on their Primary Tier of storage, using high-performance hard disk drives. Their current storage architecture provides sufficient performance, but their data is growing at an annual rate of roughly 40 percent and adding 240TB of primary storage does not fit their budget this year. Even at a discounted price, updating their primary storage to accommodate an additional 240TB would cost upwards of $850,000.

The compounded growth rate for following years also poses a significant challenge. The department saw their only option as implementing severe storage quotas, which is not in line with other business growth mandates. They needed a way to expand their storage capacity within their budget restrictions.

Solution

After an audit of their storage environment, the IT group realized that a consequential amount of their data was inactive. Having a better idea of what data was stored and how that data was being used, the IT department chose to deploy Spectra Logic’s StorCycle. StorCycle is a storage lifecycle management software that manages data to NAS, Object Storage Disk, Tape or Cloud. StorCycle was able to identify and move an estimated 70 percent of data, deemed inactive or “cold data”, off of their Primary Tier of storage and onto a Perpetual Tier consisting of a combination of NAS and tape.

Data not accessed in at least 30 days will go to NAS, and any data not accessed in over six months will be moved to tape. The total cost of implementation for the new solution, including the software and the NAS and tape storage repositories, will run well under $200,000.

Instead of adding another 240TB of high-speed HDD, they now project being able to hold their Primary Tier storage growth level for another 18 to 24 months, given the amount of data being moved to the Perpetual Tier. Their users are also seeing an upside: the IT department has increased storage quotas for NAS and is now able to completely eliminate quotas for anything moved to tape, where users will still have seamless access to data for roughly 2¢/GB. As data continues to grow, StorCycle extends the fast access of primary storage to other tiers and allows users to easily restore any file or directory that exists on lower cost storage from their local work machine.

Why StorCycle:

Automatically identifies and moves inactive data off of primary storage
Reduces the size of the Primary Tier and seamlessly extends access
Simple, two-tiered storage paradigm
Perpetual retention in a scalable object-based tier

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