Keeping Storage Costs In Line as Your Data Grows Exponentially

The amount of overall data being generated by businesses continues to grow at an incredible rate. An infographic from Raconteur clearly illustrates this fact: by 2025 it’s estimated that 463 exabytes of data will be created globally every day! Arcserve’s own research found that 86% of IT decision makers believe that their data volume will increase 10x or more in the next five years. That’s a massive amount of data to manage and store. While you are probably fully aware of how your mission-critical data is stored, protected, and recoverable, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Unstructured Data and Primary Storage

The vast majority of your data is likely to be unstructured and may not even be on your mission-critical list. In fact, according to IDC 80% of data will be unstructured by 2025. That’s already creating problems for many organizations because they keep all of their data on their primary storage, a very costly approach that forces critical choices as to how much data to keep and for how long. As you look ahead for your organization at the growing mountain of data in your future, the first question you need to ask yourself is, can my current infrastructure meet this surging and unpredictable demand? The next question that’s sure to follow is, how will that affect my IT budget? If you’re using your primary storage solution for all of your data, you’re probably paying far too much per terabyte.

Shift to Secondary Storage to Sweat Your Primary Storage Assets Longer

Badger International, which specializes in insurance and related services, had two expensive storage attached network (SAN) appliances that were reaching full capacity and had to be upgraded. As an insurance company, it is mission-critical for Badger to protect all of its data from any incident, whether it’s a natural disaster or a ransomware attack. Badger was also required by its compliance auditors to store its backup data offsite. After looking at their options, Badger chose OneXafe® for its secondary storage solution. The OneXafe appliance features a scale-out architecture that lets Badger seamlessly add one drive at a time or multiple nodes in a cluster, making it perfect for large-scale unstructured data and backup targets. Badger shifted its secondary storage load from its existing SANs, providing off-site replication for compliance. OneXafe also ensures Badger can quickly recover if a ransomware attack is ever successful by taking immutable snapshots every 90 seconds that can’t be altered or deleted. Restoring data from the snapshots is fast and easy. “OneXafe is the perfect solution for us, killing two birds with one stone. On the one hand we were able to off-load our secondary data from our expensive SANs, allowing us to use existing assets much longer and save budget. On the other hand we now have a solution that not only has enough storage for our requirements today, but also enough scalability to support us for years to come. This has been a great investment,” said George McKay, Group Head of IT for Badger.

Limit Downtime and Cost-Effectively Meet Future Demand

Martins Group, a family-owned car dealership, faced a different set of problems. With two old Windows 2008 servers reaching their end of life it was time for an upgrade. While the company doesn’t generate a lot of data today, that amount is growing quickly as videos and photos are increasingly used to improve customer service experiences. Budget was also a consideration. Martins’ challenge was that any downtime would cause substantial damage to the business and migrating data to a new server would have taken at least three days. After learning that OneXafe’s simple plug-and-play approach would only take two hours to deploy, Martins was sold. Even better, with OneXafe Martins now has a highly scalable storage solution with a “pay as you grow” model, limiting immediate costs while ensuring future data requirements can be met. The company also gained the added benefit of ransomware protection and easy recovery thanks to the immutable snapshots OneXafe takes every 90 seconds.

Increase Security, Scalability, and Efficiency

Both Badger International and Martins Group faced the same challenges millions of businesses are facing today—more data, more threats, and more IT complexity. Add in the challenges brought on by the pandemic and everyone in IT likely has their hands full. Like Badger and Martins, by choosing OneXafe you can quickly deploy a more cost-effective approach for storing secondary data that can easily scale out as needed and extend the life cycle of your existing primary storage infrastructure. As a result, you won’t need to ask your CFO for an unexpected and substantial new primary storage budget. You’ll also enhance your data security posture, ensure you can easily recover from a data disaster, and reduce your overall data storage costs. All without a big capital expense or a forklift upgrade. Learn how OneXafe can work for your company by watching our on-demand webcast.