
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.
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.

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.
- 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