New Year’s Resolution 2020: Save Money by Archiving Your Cold, Unused Data to the Cloud
In this special guest blog, Mike Richards of Igneous explains the value of an unstructured data management strategy to address the unrelenting growth of file data in your environment.
If you find yourself overwhelmed with unstructured/NAS data as you exit 2019, make a resolution in the New Year to clean up your primary storage by moving your stale data to a low-cost tier in the cloud. The result will be valuable savings in time and money.
You may say to yourself, ‘archiving won’t make that much of an impact’ – well I’m here to tell you it can. Granted, it will take a monumental shift in the way you manage your primary storage environment. But it’s worth it.
Here are the top three benefits of cleaning up your unused data:
1. Save money and time by leveraging cheap and deep cloud storage for older data-sets
2. Extend the life of primary storage which should be reserved for important/active data by archiving cold unused data
3. Eliminate the complexity and recovery concerns of legacy backup such as tape systems
Imagine a scenario where a company is starting a project that will require 500 terabytes of primary capacity. If that company doesn’t have 500 terabytes of space available, they will either need to buy new capacity, or free up space on their existing environment. To add 500 terabytes of storage to the primary tier, connect it to the network, protect it, power it, cool it, and house it in the datacenter can easily cost more than $1M over the next five years.
Igneous research found that same organization could instead archive 500 terabytes of cold data from their existing primary storage tier to a low-cost archive tier at a cost of $400K or less over those same five years, gaining the same amount of unused primary storage while saving $600K or more.
That’s great for terabytes of data, but when faced with petabytes of data, consisting of billions and billions of files, how do you determine what data is important vs. stale? Adding to the problem, IT architects and data owners are often times at odds over; the importance of data, what data could be archived, and what SLAs should accompany the data movement.
Historically, IT has mandated that the data owners themselves designate what can be moved off primary storage and onto cheaper archive tiers. However, because data owners have been burned by painful retrieval processes and they fear losing access to their data, they end up holding onto cold data long after its usefulness, increasing primary storage and backup costs.
This is why we recommend customers implement an unstructured data management strategy that leverages purpose-built indexing and archiving strategies, allows for customizable policies, and can execute against predetermined SLAs.
Igneous’ modern cloud architecture was designed by a team with over a century of file experience at industry leaders like Isilon, Dell EMC, NetApp, Qumulo, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Igneous specializes in data visualization, backup and archive for unstructured data featuring two complementary products to address the unrelenting growth of unstructured data.
DataDiscover – the fastest way to see, analyze, and act on NAS data. Scan and index data at a rate of a petabyte per hour. Kick-off a scan in the morning and have a full index of the last time data was modified or accessed by lunchtime.
DataProtect – enterprise NAS backup and archive. Intelligently move data to either low-cost on-premises or cloud storage tiers. Reclaim primary storage capacity while reducing overall storage costs.
If you’re interested in tackling your biggest data storage challenges in 2020, sign up for a personal demo with an Igneous solution architect and we’ll walk you through the modern requirements of an unstructured data management strategy. Kick off the new year with an efficient unstructured data management solution and save boatloads of money for your 2020 budget!
As a strategic Igneous partner, CDI is well-positioned to help you with your unstructured data management goals and to get you up and running with Igneous DataDiscover and DataProtect.
To learn more about Igneous go to www.igneous.io