Storage is elastic. How do I know you ask? Yesterday I visited a customer who is using the Storwize product to do Real-time Compression on their primary storage. The customer is Allianz and has been using the product for over a year. They see 75% compression on their users home directory data. To give you an idea, Allianz is an insurance company and generates TONS of spreadsheets, 14TB worth of spreadsheets (okay, not all 14TB is spreadsheets but you get the picture).
Prior to Allianz purchasing the Storwize technology, Allianz didn’t have great data management practices. Users store data in their home directories and there is really no discipline around deleting or cleaning up files so data just grows. Additionally, storage isn’t really budgeted for. Overall IT is but at a storage level, they just purchase some when the need some.
Again, prior to the Storwize technology, Allianz had their primary storage and a backup to tape at their local site. They then replicated the data to their remote site and also performed a backup to tape.
Allianz has an overall IT mission to reduce spend by 10% per year. The thing to think about is that this 10% could come from a lot of places including data management.
Once the Storwize technology was installed the first things they saw were:
- 75% capacity optimization
- Better data management capabilities through Storwize reporting
- The ability to keep more data on line and available for faster recoveries
- No change in any of their existing storage processes
Storwize allowed Allianz to compress their primary storage 75% and then leverage the snapshot feature on their NTAP to create compressed snapshots seamlessly for quick recovery. Additionally, Allianz now does local backups to disk instead of tape reducing the amount of time it takes to do local backups and providing them with on line backup data for much faster recoveries which is much easier to manage. Allianz then replicates 75% less data on a daily basis to their remote site which saves on replication costs, then at the remote site they are able to perform the same snapshots and backup to disk that they do at the local site in a very timely manner providing them with a highly efficient DR site. Then they create one backup to tape to archive their data. It is important to note that the Storwize technology fit into their environment with no re-architecture to any of their applications, servers, networks or storage nor did any of their IT processes change when it came to backups and recoveries - they worked seamlessly with the compressed data as if it were non-compressed data.
The point of the piece well is two fold. One, customers are using the Storwize technology to successfully manage their storage growth and drive down costs. By performing more snapshots and backups to disk they are able to perform faster recoveries which save them time, make them more competitive by being able to respond faster and they haven’t had to purchase storage for two years.
The second point is that disk is elastic. The more space you give users, it is proven that they will just use the space. Now instead of one local copy and a backup to tape, Allianz uses the extra disk space to store more data that allows them to be much more effective at business continuity. Give users the space, and they will find a way to use it.
This was indeed true when data deduplication became popular. Every vendor I spoke with five years ago that sold disk for backups claimed they would sell less disk for backups. The reality was because it saved time in the backup process customers did more backups to disk. Because it reduced the cost of disk and brought it in line with tape – customers stored data on disk vs. tape. Because it could replicate data very efficiently customers bought more disk for a second site to keep data in a DR site. If a customer would have bough 10TB of disk for disk based backups before, they still bought 10TB and kept more backup data on-line for a greater variation of recovery point objectives. All viable business cases. Now if a customer isn’t doing data deduplication – well they are one pink slip away from a deduplicated recovery from disk.
Customers use the disk to their advantage which goes to show that if a customer has a budget of $1M they will spend the $1M – how it gets divided up may be different. For example in the Storwize case, instead of buying $1M of disk, customers now buy $700K of disk and $300K of Storwize and use that disk 5 times more efficiently.
As for Allianz, Daniel Gill said “Storwize was a no brainer.” Not only does it help him save his company money, it makes them a much better IT shop by having more data readily available when their users need it.
