Spend a little, save a lot
Everyone expects new technology to be faster. But potential improvements must always be weighed against the upgrade cost. Here at Northdoor, we want to prove that you can have your cake and eat it: invest in faster data storage while simultaneously cutting your costs over three years.
In a real-life TCO study, we helped a client upgrade and achieve:
- higher throughput and reduced latency
- 75% reduction in physical footprint
- 23% reduction in CO2 emissions
- zero-impact data compression
- full payback in less than three years.
With three decades of experience in helping blue-chip companies protect and drive value from their data, Northdoor can help you achieve similar results. As one of only a small number of IBM Platinum partners in the UK, Northdoor also holds the coveted Speciality status in IBM Storage solutions.
Sign up for an assessment of your data storage environment today and see how much you could save.
Problem analysed, solution delivered
To support their key systems, our client had deployed a pair of IBM Storwize V7000 Generation 2 SAN storage enclosures, occupying 4U of rack space in each of two data centres. This equipment provided around 50TB of capacity across three tiers: high-speed SSD (20% of capacity), mid-speed SAS (30% of capacity) and near-line for less demanding use cases such as backups and archives (50% of capacity). The client was taking advantage of IBM Spectrum Virtualize Real Time Compression to increase the effective capacity, but this came with a performance penalty.
We analysed the existing environment and determined the client’s likely future needs before proposing the replacement of the Storwize units with new all-flash IBM FlashSystem 5200 arrays. These occupy a quarter of the physical space (1U per site) and naturally offer far greater throughput and lower latency – essentially making all the capacity more performant than the previous top-tier storage. What’s more, the new arrays use hardware-based compression, so there’s no longer any performance hit.
Real-world savings
This TCO study is a great example of how businesses can replace relatively new hardware – the previous environment was barely five years old – and achieve impressive savings.
The cost of vendor maintenance, power and cooling for the previous environment was £100,000 over three years. The total cost of the new solution? Just under £70,000 over three years. That represents a three-year return on investment of 144%, delivering a net saving of £30,000 to the business – all while providing higher performance, greater capacity, and increased ease of management. Meanwhile, the CO2 emissions over three years will fall from 33,000 kg to 25,500 kg, a 23% reduction, helping our client with its organisation-wide environmental commitments.
Beyond these immediately quantifiable benefits, the new data storage environment will simplify workload growth, improve application performance, and contribute to higher overall productivity.
To find out how Northdoor could help you boost data storage performance and capacity with a solution that rapidly pays for itself, contact us today for a free assessment of your existing storage landscape.
