StorCycle Small Corporate IT Department

Overview:

This small corporate IT department is in charge of establishing, monitoring and maintaining information technology systems and services. They have limited available resources and as the amount of data they manage increases, they want a solution that can scale at their pace without requiring a significant up-front hardware investment.

“We manage a relatively small amount of data, and we wanted to reduce the amount we spent on backup without having to invest in new hardware. StorCycle helped us shorten our backup windows and control additional backup licensing fees as we grow, lowering our total costs by identifying and moving inactive data off of our Primary Tier of storage and into the cloud.”

– System administrator at corporate IT department


Problem:

This IT group currently manages roughly 12TB of data on their Primary Tier of storage, and estimates an annual growth rate of 25 percent. To protect against data loss and corruption, they back up their data to a NAS repository. Their backup software license runs around $30,000 per year for 12TB, with a 20 percent annual support charge. They pay an additional $2,000/TB for any data over the original 12TB license. The backup software licensing is based on capacity, with identical charges for any given storage target – NAS, tape or cloud.

Given the current support pricing structure and their predicted data growth, the IT group expects that new data will cost them an additional $6,000 in backup license fees and $1,200 in support next year. Their resources are limited and they want to reduce the amount spent on backup. They are considering moving to the cloud as a backup target. Moreover, they have conservatively estimated that 50 percent of their Primary Tier data (6TB) is inactive and can be moved to a lower cost storage tier.

Solution

The IT group chose Spectra’s StorCycle storage lifecycle management software to address the problem at hand. They deployed the Administrator License of StorCycle’s licensing model at a list price of $12,000 and technical support cost of $1,800 per year. StorCycle’s Administrator License allows users to move up to 25TB of data to the cloud for no additional charge. They decide to make two copies of their inactive data for redundancy. They move 6TB to a more responsive cloud archive tier (AWS Infrequent Access) at an annual cost of $900, and archive a second copy for disaster recovery in AWS Deep Glacier for $71 per year.

Because they manage a relatively small amount of data, they will not incur any capacity charges for moving this data off of primary storage and into the cloud with StorCycle, and will spend less than $1,000 per year on AWS cloud storage for their inactive data.

The remaining 6TB of active data will still be backed up on a daily basis, but because the amount of data has been reduced by 50 percent, backup windows will be cut by half. Moving inactive data to cloud eliminates the need to increase backup licenses year over year, saving them the previously mentioned $7,200 in the first year. By end of year two, no additional StorCycle licensing costs and fixed support charges means there will be an actual cost savings of $7,400. By end of year three, they will have an additional cost savings of $11,052. Their StorCycle investment represents a total cost savings of $10,852 over the three-year period. As StorCycle continues to identify and move inactive data to the Perpetual Tier of storage over time, the organization will also save money by controlling the size of their Primary Tier of storage.

Why StorCycle:

  • No investment on new hardware
  • Identifies and moves inactive data off of expensive primary storage
  • Shortens backup windows and reduces backup costs
  • Comprehensive cloud archive strategy
  • StorCycle Administrator License

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

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