Rein in Data Storage and Backup Costs

Never before have enterprises had to deal with this much data. IDC says you can expect 90% of it to be unstructured, growing by 65% every year. Storing and managing all that data is crippling IT budgets.

It’s time to stop turning to your storage vendor to solve your data problem. That’s a costly course on which few can afford to stay. Instead look at how you’re managing the data you’re storing.

Those tasked with storing enterprise data rarely get any real insight from business users into the petabytes they’re managing—so they treat it all the same. If they knew their data: what kind, who created it, and who used it last, they’d see that about 70% of it is cold: files that haven’t been touched in over a year. Unfortunately, without that insight, they continue to store and backup their cold data the same as their hot—a costly mistake.

Hot data: the white glove treatment
Organizations typically treat data sitting on their network attached storage (NAS), or primary storage, like the treasured asset that it is. It’s often stored on expensive Flash, or higher end NAS that uses fast disks and is located near the client or in multiple regions as needed—and it doesn’t come cheap. This ensures fast, uninterrupted user access to business-critical data.

It’s also dutifully replicated for disaster recovery purposes, and has backups maybe copied a few more times for good measure.

Paying top dollar for this primary storage and management of your hot data makes sense. Paying the same for your cold data—the bulk of all your data—doesn’t.

Cost of copying cold data
Not only is storing cold data on primary storage needlessly expensive, it also means you’re backing up and repeatedly copying data that never changes. This is not only costly but lengthens backup windows, which ultimately affects the performance of your hot data. Now you have a storage, budget, and performance problem.

Knowing the difference between your hot and cold data is the key to achieving significant savings. Cold data doesn’t need to be on the highest-performing, highest-priced storage. Nor should you pay for it to be repeatedly backed up and replicated.

By tiering and archiving all your cold data to more affordable secondary or object storage, some of your data storage and backup cost savings can go toward more expensive Flash storage for optimal performance of your hot data. And with transparent tiering and archiving, your users and applications still access moved data from its original location, without interruption.

Using an analytics-driven data management solution, such as Komprise, helps you know your data first to make smarter data decisions that can cut significant costs.

Factors that affect your savings
The following considerations will determine how much your organization can save with Komprise Intelligent Data Management. The same ones are used in our TCO calculator, which you can use to determine accurate savings estimate based on your actual environment when you start to know and manage your data with Komprise Intelligent Data Management.

1. Data growth rate
   How fast is your data growing—% year over year?
2. Type of Tier 1 storage
   Do you have NFS, SMB/CIFS, or NAS storage?
3. Annual cost of Tier 1 storage
   How much do you pay per TB/year for your Tier 1 storage?
4. Do you replicate your data?
5. How many days of snapshots do you keep?
6. Do you also backup your data?

Beyond cost savings, consider overall value to be gained from an analytics-driven data management solution like Komprise. One-trick migration utilities are a one-and-done sunk cost. Another migration needs another license.

Komprise Intelligent Data Management is a comprehensive solution that includes analytics, transparent archiving, migration, and replication—all without affecting user access to data. It also supports AI and Big Data projects with the ability to create a virtual data lake the whole company can use to search, tag, and operate on.

Only need migration? Komprise offers Elastic Data Migration as a standalone product, offering:

• Analytics: Powerful data analytics give insights that ensure better migration planning and management
• Super-fast migration: Specifically designed to work efficiently on small files and work across WANs to reduce migration times, its highly parallelized, multi-processing, multi-threaded approach speeds migrations
• Cost savings: Available at a fraction of the cost of leading commercial migration tools

Komprise Intelligent Data Management allows you to take control of your data in three critical ways to save substantial costs:

Find out how Komprise can save costs for your organization. Contact us to get a free demo in your environment to see the savings you could achieve with your next storage refresh. Schedule a demo today.