Spectra StorCycle™ – Mid Sized IT Department Use Case

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 their operations require increasingly greater performance from their primary storage, they are considering upgrading their Primary Tier hardware to improve speed of access to data that is in active use.

“Best-in-class performance from our primary storage is an absolute requirement for our organization. But as it turns out, a consequential amount of the data on our Primary Tier was not in active use. By deploying StorCycle, we freed up space, improved performance on our primary storage devices and lowered overall costs – we can now afford the all-flash upgrade we had been delaying!”

– System administrator at corporate IT department

Problem:

This corporate IT department is in the process of upgrading the performance of their primary storage tier. They have targeted the Nimble All Flash Array A300 to replace their existing hard disk drive infrastructure and improve their primary data access. They presently manage roughly 500TB of primary storage, and their capacity requirements and data growth are well under control. They are considering foregoing the performance upgrade due to cost.

The 500TB solution they selected had a list price of $3,846,000. With significant discounts, this solution would cost them around $1.1M or $2,200/TB. Moreover, they estimate that 60 percent of their data currently stored on primary storage is inactive and can be moved to a lower cost tier.

Solution

The IT department chose to deploy Spectra Logic’s StorCycle, a storage lifecycle management software that manages data to a Perpetual Tier of storage, which includes NAS, Object Storage Disk, Tape or Cloud. StorCycle was able to identify and move the corporation’s inactive files, migrating 300TB of data onto a low cost NAS repository. The cost for the Perpetual Tier NAS storage will be roughly $21,000, or around 7¢/GB ($70/TB) for 300TB.

Because of the considerable cost savings they achieved by migrating cold data to a Perpetual Tier of storage with StorCycle, the IT group can now move forward with their primary storage performance upgrade. They estimate the cost of creating a 200TB flash-only, Primary Tier platform at about $440,000. Their total savings is close to $600,000, including the cost of their investment on StorCycle and the new NAS storage. By deploying a new solution for inactive data, they are now able to significantly increase the performance of their data center and work with state-of-the-art technology, while maintaining seamless access to migrated data on the NAS tier via their StorCycle software. Removing inactivate and “low transaction” data from primary storage enables organizations to more affordably upgrade to a high-performance primary storage tier that uses SSD, NVMe flash or other cutting-edge high performance technologies.

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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