StorCycle Mid-Sized IT dept

Overview:

Economics and performance objectives guarantee that most midsized- and enterprise 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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"When we set out on our search to find a storage solution capable of preserving Imperial War Museums’ substantial digital archive, there were specific criteria on which we were not willing to compromise. Spectra met all of our requirements and then some, and now continues to deliver with StorCycle’s storage lifecycle management capabilities."

– Ian Crawford, Chief Information Officer, Imperial War Museums

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– Eric Grau, Manager – Media Asset Management, Joyce Meyer Ministries

"We appreciate the collaborative relationship and Spectra’s attentiveness to incorporating our feedback and ideas into solution enhancements. Our continuing investment into Spectra technology on behalf of our organization has proven invaluable in helping us implement the next level architectural model taking us into the future."

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– HPC Linux Systems Engineer, OLCF

"The new library has just shy of 14,000 slots for tapes. We were able to easily move all 70 petabytes of existing data into the new system and have grown to 104 petabytes in size and have plenty of room for at least a year or two before we have to start thinking about expanding."

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– Jeffrey McDonald, director of IT, Hormel Institute at University of Minnesota

"We have to store a lot of data for long periods of time. A single microscope can capture 10TB of data in as little as a few hours, and a published breakthrough on cancer research can take anywhere from a few years to a couple of decades. The BlackPearl and tape solution from Spectra provides a scalable and cost-effective way to store multiple data workflows with varying retention requirements."

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