Many organizations are at a turning point as they strategize their storage infrastructure needs for the long haul. In many interviews with IDC, end users reveal similar concerns consistently. Unsurmountable data growth, risks, long-term data retention for compliance, and cost constraints are some major concerns that define the road map for IT infrastructure within any organization. Generally, a road map is a set of requirements that drive the adoption of certain technologies or platforms. For example, rightsizing applications may mean potentially adopting newer platforms (private/public cloud, IaaS, PaaS, and on-/off-premises traditional storage). IDC's 2018 Data Services for Hybrid Cloud Survey indicates that while organizations are adopting a cloud-first strategy, security concerns (primarily for data in use) lead them to deploy a certain percentage of the workloads on-premises, driving the overall hybrid cloud adoption. The same survey indicates that data loss prevention, ensuring data quality, and regulatory compliance are the top data-related challenges overall.

Learn from:

• A Large Retail Chain Store in the U.S. 100,000 employees, 100 IT staff, 6,000+ applications, over 2PB of unstructured data on NAS arrays.
• A Large Broadcasting Studio in the U.S. Over 6PB of storage including block, file, and object data; growing at about 500TB a year. Dependence on LTO tape libraries for archiving, but now using Cloudian as an active archive tier to keep data accessible at all times.
• A Wealth and Asset Management Services Company in Europe. Over 4,000 employees; 6PB of data across siloed storage solutions for block, file, and object.

We are living in an age of explosive data growth. IDC projects that the digital universe is growing 50% a year, doubling in size every 2 years. In media and entertainment, the growth is even faster as capacity-intensive formats such as 4K, 8K, and 360/VR gain traction. Fortunately, new trends in data storage are making it easier to stay ahead of the curve.

Historically, many studios and broadcasters have relied on LTO tape as the most economical option for long-term media archiving and backup — but that is beginning to change. The increasing costs of maintaining and expanding aging tape libraries are prompting many businesses to explore other options. At the same, the costs of more modern and flexible solutions like object storage now make them a cost-effective alternative to LTO tape.

In this paper, we will examine how object storage stacks up against LTO tape for media archives and backup. In addition to a detailed total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis covering both capital and operational expenses, this paper will look at the opportunity costs of not leveraging the real-time data access of object storage to monetize existing data.

Every organization is under pressure to meet the exponential growth in demand for file storage capacity. Surveys show, however, that 60% or more of data on Tier 1 storage is either dormant or rarely used. Organizations can now achieve significant savings by moving that inactive content to a secondary storage tier.

While the concept of storage tiering is well known, it has not been widely adopted in the past due to various limitations. New storage technologies now overcome those limitations, making tiering an attractive option to reclaim capacity on Tier 1 storage systems and reduce backup costs and time requirements — often resulting in overall file storage cost savings of 50%.

Of particular note, new solutions now enable these savings with zero impact on user data access.

In this paper, we compare the total cost of ownership (TCO) of traditional NAS to the TCO of traditional NAS augmented by file tiering with Cloudian object storage.