In a traditional, on-prem storage setup, a terabyte of storage isn’t just a single terabyte of storage. No, there are copies of the data everywhere, and these copies are the main culprits in the rising cost of storage.
Let’s break it down to get a sense of how much is included in the total cost of storage.First, IT has to protect the data, which means provisioning additional storage for backup. If you’re following the 3-2-1 rule (three copies of your data on at least two different forms of media with one stored offsite), that’s at least two additional copies of your data to manage and store, plus the cost of the backup system.
But those aren’t the only costs to keep in mind — there’s also the cost of downtime and lost data, which varies widely depending on your recovery point objectives (RPOs) and RTOs recovery time objectives (RTOs). It’s still common for organizations to back up just once a day, so in the case of a disaster or corruption, you could lose up to a full day’s worth of data. In cases where you’ll need to restore a lot of data, you also need to consider how much time is required to retrieve the tapes or download backups from the cloud. You could be looking at hours, even days of downtime, and those costs need to be factored in.
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A cascade of copies
Then there’s disaster recovery (DR). Whether you have a fully redundant offsite DR facility or you’re relying on cloud-based DR-as-a-service, that’s at least one more copy to manage and provision, not to mention the associated networking and maintenance costs of the DR site or cloud.
But you’re not yet done with making copies. If you’ve got remote offices that need access to data, you can have them use a virtual private network (VPN) connection, but that’s very slow. Especially if you’re dealing with large files, the performance hit is likely unacceptable. So, more likely, you’re replicating data to each site, creating even more copies.
By the time you’re done storing, protecting and providing access to that 1 TB of data, even if you dedupe and compress them, you’re still managing at least a half dozen copies and probably far more than that. For that single TB of data, you’ll likely need at least twice that in raw capacity, plus additional backup, DR and replication systems to deploy and manage. And we’ve not even touched the need to secure the data, ideally with end-to-end encryption both in transit and at rest.
There’s a lot more to the total cost of storage than the storage array.
Eliminating storage TCO by reducing the number of copies
Clearly, when it comes to reducing the total cost of enterprise storage, a big opportunity is eliminating the need to make so many copies, which increases both management and capacity costs. That’s exactly what the ClearSky service does. We provide our customers with a single, durable copy of the data to manage, and they only pay for usable storage within the service. That’s not to say there aren’t multiple copies of customer data in our service. There most definitely are: in the on-prem appliance, at our point of presence (PoP) on the edge and multiple places in the backing cloud. But they’re completely transparent to the customer.
As a result, the customer never needs to worry about or pay extra for:
- Babysitting the backup process
- Deploying and managing a backup infrastructure
- Maintaining an offsite DR facility
- Replicating to multiple sites
Barrister Digital Solutions (BDS) is a good example of how collapsing the number of copies to one can affect IT. BDS provides digital discovery, document management and litigation support for many of the largest law firms in the country, as well as large corporations and the public sector. Security is the company’s top concern regarding its data, given the kind of sensitive information it manages, but the IT team also wanted to simplify its data protection process and sharply reduce its storage footprint. CEO Nick Bruno was tired of buying more capacity than BDS needed at the moment in order to ensure he’d have enough to cover new data a year or two down the line.
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With ClearSky’s on-demand primary storage service, BDS was able to shrink its storage footprint by 80%. Plus, it no longer needed separate backup and DR systems because ClearSky handles all of that in the background without any impact on the production environment. Even better, BDS was able to reduce its RPOs and RTOs near zero and encrypt all its data in transit and at rest.
“Not having to invest a lot of capital into our infrastructure, and, instead, using a third party to help us manage that part of the business was a relief,” Bruno said. “This is a perfect solution for law firms and guys like me who serve law firms.”
Want to see how ClearSky can clear up your data copy chaos? Sign up for a demo today.