“We were at an unsustainable data growth rate… Now we can move large amounts of data to the cloud without any disruption to employees.”
Sean Horan
Sr. Network Systems Specialist, GUTS
The Data Storage Challenge
Boone County, Indiana was facing massive influx of data, primarily from evidentiary data. The Sheriff’s Department had adopted body and dash cameras for all its officers and vehicles. And the Boone County Courthouse was mandated to indefinitely retain accessible case files on both ongoing cases and all historical cases—most of which are inactive after being closed. In the five years since deploying the cameras, evidentiary data grew by 3000%. “We were at an unsustainable growth rate,” said Sean Horan, manager of IT services for Boone County at Government Utilities Technology Service, Inc. (GUTS), its managed IT services provider.
As the sheer volume of backed up data continued to grow, so did the time and cost to complete their weekly off-site tape backups, and the recovery time from them in the event of a disaster. They needed a plan to:
- Lower their storage costs
- Modernize their existing SAN environment
- Improve weekly backup and restore times
And do it all without any data disruption to the county employees or applications.
The Data Management Solution
- Komprise Intelligent Data Management
- Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
Boone County wanted to leverage Microsoft Azure Blob Storage to lower costs, but it didn’t know what data to migrate to the cloud or how to manage it without affecting user and application access. GUTS used Komprise to run an analysis that showed 83% of the county’s data was cold and hadn’t been accessed in over six months.
Using the ROI reporting from the Komprise Intelligent Data Management Platform, the GUTS team built a five year plan that projected 70% savings by using Komprise to transparently archive cold data into Azure Blob. Their convincing proposal quickly secured plan approval.
Moving to Azure Blob
GUTS set policies in Komprise to archive each departments’ data to Azure Blob. Because data moved by Komprise still appears on Boone County’s SAN, there was zero disruption to users.
Intelligent Data Management Results
By using Komprise to archive cold data off the SAN to Azure Blob, GUTS was able to achieve the following for Boone County:
- Reduce the size of their weekly backups by 88%
- Reduce the cost associated with backups by 72%: purchasing less tape, taking tape loaders offline, and reducing the tape stored off-site
- Reduce the disaster recovery time from a week to a day and half
- Purchase a smaller all-flash SAN for hot data storage at 42% of the cost
- Retained file-based access from the original storage to data stored as objects on Azure Blob
About the Solutions
Microsoft Azure Blob
Azure Blob enables organizations to store any type of unstructured data—images, videos, audio, documents, and more—with proven technology at exabyte scale. Blob storage handles trillions of stored objects, with millions of average requests per second, for customers around the world.
Komprise Intelligent Data Management
Komprise empowers businesses to take control of their data with no interference to applications, users, or hot data. Komprise Intelligent Data Management is the foundation for analytics-driven data management which is key to putting data in the right place at the right time across all storage. Analyze, move, and easily find your data with Komprise.
Learn More
Experience a complimentary trial of Komprise in your own environment to see the true picture of your data and how much you can save. Schedule a Demo
Read the blog post: Boone County and Komprise: Preserving Bodycam Footage