NSS: Return On Investment

Northern Storage Suite delivers financial returns in three ways: by improving utilization of existing resources, by reducing the pace of hardware investment and by reducing the need for administrative intervention in data management.

Maximised returns from existing hardware

Northern Storage Suite maximizes the returns still available from pre-existing hardware resources.

Through Northern Storage Suite’s abilities to identify and reclaim poorly utilized storage space customers are able to cut resource consumption by an average of 30% within the first 30-days of operations. The low-value files that are removed typically include users’ private photo galleries, music and movie collections, files that have not been accessed within the last two years and stale files owned by users who have left the organization.

Figure one demonstrates the actual results of such a clean-up policy. These results were achieved through the use of automation and end-user integration policies at a primary regional data center within a European financial institution. The company succeeded in reducing storage consumption by 31.12% during the first month of NSS operations.

Figure 1: The impact of NSS deployment on storage usage levels

• Maximize the returns generated from existing hardware
• Reduce peripheral resource consumption and cost; energy, backup time and tape, etc.
• Reduce architectural complexity; make the infrastructure simpler and cheaper to manage

Reduced need for hardware investments

Northern Storage Suite extends hardware investment intervals; delaying investment needs and slowing overall pace of data center growth.

By slowing usage growth rates IT departments are able to maintain service levels with a smaller storage footprint. Figure two demonstrates that by reducing the daily usage growth rate by even fractions of a percent, in this case 0.042%, companies are able to reduce future storage needs by more than 50% over two years.

Reduced need for hardware investment impacts on administrative costs, energy costs and pure hardware costs in terms of simple disk and disk arrays. Most significantly, it reduces the need to add major architectural components; fewer major new devices to house new storage capacity.

Figure 2: Slowing footprint growth with Northern Storage Suite

• Reduce investments in capacity growth; disk, backup resources, management applications
• Reduce the number of ‘leaps’ in infrastructure development; fewer major new devices
• Even very small reductions in usage growth rates have a very significant impact over time

Reduced administrative costs

Northern Storage Suite reduces the single largest cost associated with storage provision and maintenance.

Administration of storage resources is the single largest drain on the storage budget; hardware investment and running costs typically make up around 20% of overall storage costs. Administrators spend significant amounts of time in monitoring and reporting on storage utilization, managing file distribution, archiving old data, removing non-business related content, evaluating and implementing infrastructural development, etc, etc.

Northern Storage Suite reduces administrative costs in two ways. Firstly, through delegation to end-users, reporting and automation features NSS is able to remove and streamline administrative tasks; reducing the administrative cost per megabyte. Secondly, by reducing overall data center size NSS is able to reduce the source of storage administration costs.

Figure three shows how a reduction in the cost per megabyte, coupled with a reduction in the size of the cost center itself can have a very dramatic effect on the administrative cost of storage.

Figure 3: Reducing administrative costs with Northern Storage Suite

• Reductions in storage usage are magnified dramatically in administrative cost reductions
• Disengage administrators from fire-fighting and let them focus on more strategic projects
• Reduce the cost per megabytes and the shrink the cost centre itself

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