IBM > Case Studies > Cutting data storage costs for a government organization by 30 percent

Cutting data storage costs for a government organization by 30 percent

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

IBM Spectrum Virtualize™

Tech Stack

Cloud Storage
Data Virtualization

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Infrastructure Inspection
Regulatory Compliance Monitoring

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

About The Customer

The customer is a U.S. government organization. The organization was finding it increasingly hard to fulfill its core mission as workload grew. Years of deploying disk arrays on a project-by-project basis had created a sprawling, inefficient data storage infrastructure. Each application typically had a separately managed silo of storage that could not be shared with new applications. These islands of storage were typically either bursting at the seams or significantly under-utilized—causing performance issues in the first scenario, and representing wasted investment in the second. The costs for acquiring and operating storage systems from multiple different vendors within this environment were high and rising, and the organization recognized that its essentially unplanned approach to data storage was unsustainable.

The Challenge

A U.S. government organization was struggling with a sprawling, inefficient data storage infrastructure due to years of deploying disk arrays on a project-by-project basis. Each application had a separately managed silo of storage that could not be shared with new applications. These islands of storage were either bursting at the seams or significantly under-utilized, causing performance issues or representing wasted investment. The costs for acquiring and operating storage systems from multiple different vendors were high and rising, and the organization recognized that its unplanned approach to data storage was unsustainable. The need to maintain multiple different hardware and software configurations meant that operating costs for storage were too high. The organization also had islands of both under- and over-utilization: a large proportion of its investment in storage capacity was doing no useful work while in other areas it was struggling to scale its arrays to meet growing needs.

The Solution

The government organization engaged Unisys to build and run an enterprise-class private storage cloud. Unisys understood the organization's issues and proposed a solution to re-use existing assets instead of ripping and replacing. This approach cut both the initial and ongoing costs. At the heart of the Unisys solution was the introduction of a storage virtualization layer, which pools the existing capacity into a single flexible resource with standardized management for all underlying arrays. In the first two years of the contract, the government organization worked with Unisys and IBM to migrate 8 PB of installed capacity into the private storage cloud—physically located in the existing data centers. Thanks to thin provisioning in IBM Spectrum Virtualize, the initial landscape needed only 5 PB of installed capacity, enabling the retirement of some arrays.

Operational Impact

The client pays for utilized storage only; Unisys provides daily metering.
Storage performance and cost match the changing business value of the data, IBM® Easy Tier® provides four tiers.
Unisys can provision storage from the existing pool within hours, and install new capacity 100 times faster than before.
Performance is also up, with Spectrum Virtualize enabling old arrays to support new demands.
The organization just recorded the best performance in years for its primary mission, despite huge growth in data volumes.

Quantitative Benefit

Reduces data storage costs by 30 percent.
Cuts cost and complexity through 4:1 infrastructure consolidation.
Delivers storage to application owners 100 times faster for greater responsiveness.