Customers of all sizes are dealing with the ever growing challenge of explosive data growth and how to manage and maintain that growth in a cost effective way while still maintaining preset business objectives. A recent survey done by an independent industry research network highlights this challenge. Customers were asked to explain the most important considerations in justifying IT investments and an overwhelming amount responded that reduction in operations & capital costs and speed of payback for the solution were key drivers for their purchases. In trying to find the optimal balance of technologies while minimizing costs and achieving rapid payback, you must ask yourself these questions:
How do you increase your backup & restore performance to eliminate wasted time and missed recovery objectives?
How do you simplify your staffing and managing resources across multiple sites?
Are you controlling your cost and overall demand for space, power & cooling?
How do you keep data secure but within budget?
How do you leverage your existing backup technologies without compromising your business goals and objectives?
How do you reduce the overall data protection costs?
These questions will help you start to formulate a framework to begin thinking about creating an infrastructure that will help you achieve an optimal return on investment. When assessing your backup infrastructure and trying to understand where to start, it is important to look at the following three areas:
Reducing your direct costs
Media expenses
Communication lines and infrastructure
Environmental costs (power, cooling, footprint)
Physical hardware costs
Achieving a reduction in indirect costs
Restore latency
Staffing and productivity of your staff
Downtime from existing systems
Time to payback and ultimately your total return on investment
Measured in months and ultimately years
Once you begin to understand your objectives, goals and the challenges that exist today, you can begin to build out a solution designed to balance your business goals while providing an optimal return on investment. Quantum has solutions designed to help maximize your return on investment while enabling you to align technologies to meet your business objectives.
Optimizing Storage Environments for Increased ROI
Quantum has partnered with Gartner Group to provide strategies and real world examples in this webcast “ROI Strategies for Effective Backup and DR” to help you better manage both your demanding data growth and your shrinking IT budgets effectively. Watch the Video
Case Studies
Read about customers who have achieved high ROI rates by implementing Quantum disk and/or tape based backup systems. Quantum’s solutions can provide complete ROI in only four weeks and/or achieve data reduction rates of more than 95%. Read more below:
IFB
“Few can match the level of service Quantum physically delivers. When our customers see the Quantum logo, they know they can trust us. - Graeme Gordon |Operations Director Read more
SDDC
“120TB of SDDC data is compressed onto 12.5TB of disk on the DXi7500… The performance of the DXi has also been fantastic for both backups and restores.” - Gary Horsley | System Engineer Read more
OSI
“OSI chose Quantum because it offers the best price-performance ratio on the market.” - Christian Muller | System Administrator & Backup Expert Read more
Cornerstone
“Since we implemented the Quantum Scalar i500, my systems administrator’s time on backup duties has shrunk from 70 percent to about 10 percent. He has plenty of time for future projects, and I can occasionally take a look at a newspaper.” - Alex Trouchine | IT Manager Read more
Delta Dental
“We’re consistently seeing data deduplication rates of more than 95%.” - Dan Kaplan | Manager of Networking and Technical Support Read more
White Papers and Additional Readings
White Paper - Energy and Space Efficient Storage: Multi-tier Strategies for Protecting and Retaining Data - Datacenter power, cooling, & space requirements are becoming key IT challenges for organizations of all sizes. IT managers are faced with ever-increasing demands for data protection, including better restore performance & longer retention times.
Sales Tool - Long-Term Data Retention-Five Key Considerations - Managing backup and recovery in today’s environment is a multi-dimensional challenge with both near and long term business requirements. This document gives you 5 things to think about as you design your long term data retention plan.
Quantum ROI Assessment - Contact Quantum Sales Team Discuss your needs with a knowledgeable Quantum sales rep. Our team will walk you through the Quantum ROI Assessment, take your specific situation into consideration and recommend a solution based on your needs.
Quantum’s Consulting Services - Contact Quantum Sales Team Our Consulting Services team will help you to identify and analyze your existing architecture to best optimize your infrastructure.
There are four primary technology areas to investigate when integrating a solution to maximize your return on investment
1.
Data Deduplication
Quantum’s DXi™-Series disk-based backup system with data deduplication reduces the amount of disk space you need for backup by 90% or more. This reduction in disk utilization means dramatic savings in space, power, cooling and overall costs. With deduplication, you keep much more backup data on fast-recovery RAID arrays than with any conventional disk backup system. You get fast, reliable backup and restores, increase the number of recovery points, yet use less disk capacity.
In addition to minimizing the physical disk capacity needed, deduplication can also reduce the utilization of the network bandwidth, thus reducing cost as seen in the chart below.
Replication Since Quantum’s DXi-Series with data deduplication technology reduces the amount of unique data that is being stored, the network bandwidth needed for replication can be reduced by 90% or more. Deduplication provides automated disaster recovery and site-loss protection using existing networks, which can provide significant cost savings while at the same time reducing media handling (especially in distributed environments), and lower costs. It finally makes WAN-based replication a practical solution for DR protection.
3.
Virtualization Virtualize your environment while maximizing your resource utilization. Virtualization can increase your server utilization rate from approx 10% to over 70% while enabling you to consolidate your physical hardware into fewer servers. This increase in utilization and decrease in footprint can reduce your ongoing power & cooling costs significantly and minimize your ongoing labor costs associated with troubleshooting servers. Virtualization can deliver real ROI but if you are deploying virtualization and not thinking about how to optimize data protection, then you’re likely to achieve a much lower return than you think. Quantum’s DXi-Series deduplication system combined with Quantum’s EsXpress software can help you reduce the redundant data that is very typical in a virtualized environment and simplify your backup process, thus providing additional value and savings in a virtualized environment.
Case study:
Quantum’s own IT Department deploying virtualization:
Quantum’s own IT department is replacing 68 physical servers with four virtualized servers in its data center. This generates approximate savings of $86,198/year or $7,183/mo in power & cooling alone. In addition, Quantum was able to solve the backup challenge by implementing a DXi-Series deduplication appliance combined with Quantum’s data protection solution for virtualized environments.
Tape Automation When considering your environment, it is important to consider the cost of storage not just during the initial purchase, but over the life cycle of your data. Tape automation provides a cost-effective and secure medium for storing your data long term. Quantum’s Scalar® series of tape libraries are the #1 shipping library (in terms of volume), because of their integrated management features, encryption capabilities and scalability.
Disk Array
Disk with Data Deduplication
% Savings*
Tape Library^
% Savings**
Space
0.01 m2/TB
0.0003 m2/TB
97%
0.00215 m2/TB
78%
Power
60 Watts/TB
3.47 Watts/TB
94%
0.88 Watts/TB
99%
Cooling
204 BTU/TB/H
12.76 BTU/TB/H
94%
3.0 BTU/TB/H
99%
* Savings between disk array and disk with Data Deduplication
** Savings between disk array and tape library
^ Quantum Scalar i2000 with 300 slots, LTO-4 drives, 2:1 compression
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