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Financial Services Firm Shrinks Secondary Storage: Page 2 of 2

"This is not an isolated occurrence," says Permabit's Cook. "If you had asked me about tiered value storage eighteen months ago, I would have told you we were doing 'missionary work' out in the field, and that we were finding that customers were doing limited archiving, and that whatever they were doing was centered around regularity requirements and email, and that otherwise they were just doing standard backups of all of their data. But with the cost barriers to entry dropping, enterprise interest has really taken off."

Just what can enterprises save by moving to a tiered value storage concept?

First, secondary data is efficiently sorted out from primary storage data that you are actively processing. This allows IT to focus its most intense management efforts on a much-reduced subset of mission-critical data. On the archived storage side of the equation, Cook says that the potential data storage savings can vary depending upon enterprise and application. "Using a technology like data de-duplication with archiving, we conservatively tell sites that they can save 2x-20x on the amount of storage required for their data," Cook says. The savings is found from the amount of data that gets stripped out in de-duplication, so that only one instance of data is stored.

"However, if you have a site with a high degree of virtualization and instances of data and systems, you could see an operating gain of 60 percent to 85 percent, because there is significant data replication," Cook says. This ultimately translates into a reduced need for storage media and servers, which in turn translates into energy, equipment footprint and floor space reductions and savings in the data center. These are the quantifiable costs that give IT hope that it can preserve headcount while better managing storage and other computing sources.

InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on cloud storage. Download the report here (registration required).