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.

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.

A new class of storage promises to revolutionize file data management with scalability, simplicity and cost benefits that together represent a step function improvement from traditional NAS.

With unstructured data growth rates exceeding 50% per year, the need for such a solution is clear. Files have become more numerous, much larger and they’re being retained and accessed over longer periods of time. For 30 years now, Network Attached Storage (NAS) has been the go-to technology for file storage, but the changing nature of data is straining the ability of NAS to scale, deliver adequate performance, and do so economically.

Cloudian HyperFile offers a new approach that addresses both the scalability and cost concerns. It is the first to combine traditional NAS features with a limitlessly scalable, fully modular storage environment that reduces CAPEX costs by 2/3 while simplifying management and eliminating storage silos.