5 Ways to Cut the Cost of Storage Practical advice to eliminate expenses and add business value Your information is a core business asset and differentiator. But traditional data storage can add costs disproportionate to its potential value. How can you drive down your total cost of ownership and eliminate unnecessary costs, without compromising enterprise class features? Eliminate storage costs that undermine the business value of your organization s information. In this fourth of a series of informative e-books from Exablox, we take a look at the costs of traditional storage approaches, and offer simple, practical ways that you can cut these costs while getting more for your money.
#1: Cut the Cost of Hardware Traditional storage solution vendors can significantly mark up commodity hardware costs. While they may use industry-standard drives in their appliances, they can charge over 10 times what those drives would cost you from a retail reseller. What s more, traditional storage solution vendors can lock you into waiting for their annual or semi-annual sales cycles, so you cannot take advantage of frequent often monthly competitive sales offers from drive resellers. Get the best value from your investment. With Exablox, you don t have to wait. With the freedom to Bring Your Own Drives (BYOD), you can easily deploy any disk drives, in any capacity, in any configuration, and take advantage of retail pricing and the best market rates. Moreover, Exablox OneBlox appliances have been tested as compatible with the latest generation disk drives. As a result, you have the freedom to significantly lower your total cost of storage.
#2: Reclaim the Cost of Unused Capacity With traditional storage solutions, you often find you need to manage multiple servers and storage environments for multiple business applications. Moreover, application storage demands are problematic to forecast, and typically grow at differing rates. The complexity of forecasting and inefficiency in storage planning and management using traditional solutions frequently results in paying for storage silos of unused capacity, or even requiring costly forklift upgrades. Stop paying for capacity you don t need. You get a better opportunity to pay less when you can buy capacity in real time as you need it rather than guesstimating your capacity requirements for the next 36 months. OneBlox is a scale-out NAS solution that doesn t rely on legacy RAID and enables users and applications to share access to a global pool of storage. You can instantly and non-disruptively add capacity instantly to meet your ever changing business needs, leveraging the capacity you pay for, and affordably scale as you grow.
#3: Cut the Cost of Storage Management Planning and configuring traditional storage solutions can be overwhelming. Storage reconfiguration and remote replication is often time-consuming and frustrating. The burdensome complexity of traditional storage solutions can skyrocket the costs of internal administrative overhead, as well as incur the added costs of third-party consulting fees. Simply put, easy-to-manage costs less. Exablox lets you streamline your administrative overhead and stop paying expert storage consulting fees or attending multi-week storage administration classes. From initial installation, to replacement of failed drives, to scaling additional capacity (whether a single disk drive or multiple OneBlox appliances), Exablox requires zero configuration on your part. Add storage in just three minutes, simply by adding a new drive or OneBlox to the existing ring. You can even configure offsite storage replication for disaster recovery in just four steps and four minutes, and avoid costly downtime.
#4: Cut Costs from Lack of Choice With traditional storage vendors, you have to wait until they qualify new disk technology before you can take advantage of the corresponding business benefits, often long after the same drive has been available off-the-shelf. Moreover, when was the last time you were able to spend 4-cents-per-GB for disk drives from your storage vendor? Storage array vendors may charge you up to tenfold the cost of SATA or SAS drives that they claim are more reliable. Shouldn t you be free to choose what disk drive you buy? With the flexibility of Exablox, you are in control. You can use whatever disk drive you like, with the freedom to mix-and-match drive capacities, manufacturers, and types, whether SAS or SATA to best meet your requirements and your budget. Buy the drives you prefer through your reseller or retail outlet. Moreover, you can protect your investment for a greater overall return, by leveraging drive inventory that you already own. Exablox will always be first to support the latest generation of disk drive technologies, including the first vendor to support HGST 6TB He filled disk drives. We don t have to specify the drive, but something that hightlights our BYOD and architecture will enable any user to use any drive.
#5: Cut the Cost of Cloud-managed Storage Traditional storage solutions add the cost and complexity of installing and maintaining yet another server for your storage vendor s software. Plus, you may not be able to remotely access your dedicated management network without VPN credentials. Even then, you may only be able to manage one array per login session. Cloud-managed storage can alleviate these issues. However, big-name, megalithic cloud-storage vendors charge fees that are typically cost-prohibitive for mid-sized business budgets. What if you could have the benefits of the cloud at a fraction of the cost? With Exablox, you don t have to pay enterprise-scale premiums to have enterprise class storage. You can provide your own organization with the cost-saving benefits of cloud storage that s simple to manage, grow, and use, in-house. All of this for about a third of the expense of using a megalithic third party cloud-storage vendor. At the same time, you are in complete control of your data, no network WAN bottlenecks to your information, rapid access to your information in the event of a disaster recovery, and your information is encrypted on every OneBlox. By managing OneBlox via Exablox s cloud-based management service, OneSystem, you can globally view and manage your storage using any browser from any location.
The Exablox Approach The Exablox OneBlox appliance is a powerful, re-imagined scale-out storage solution that any organization can afford. Exablox s cloud managed, scale-out, object-based storage appliance solves businesses common storage pain points: complicated installation, cumbersome storage management, lack of data security and forklift upgrades. Without the shackles of legacy storage architecture, Exablox s clean sheet approach combines the CIFS/SMB accessible OneBlox appliance with OneSystem, an elegant multi-tenant cloud-based management service. Re-imagine what your storage can offer to your organization. Learn More Find out more about how Exablox can help you overcome the challenges of data storage today. Visit our web site at www.exablox.com, call us at 855.EXABLOX, or email us at sales@exablox.com.
About Exablox Exablox is the company re-imagining storage. Exablox solves businesses runaway storage costs and information management nightmares by providing a scale-out cloud-based management solution that is both affordable and easy to use. OneBlox is an inclusive storage offering that combines an elegant hardware architecture and integrated, enterprise-grade software, including continuous data protection, inline deduplication and disaster recovery. Founded in 2010, Exablox is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA and backed by leading Silicon Valley venture firms. Visit Exablox online at www.exablox.com and join the conversation at www.twitter.com/exablox 1156 Sonora Court, Sunnyvale, CA 94086 408.773.8477 855.EXABLOX (855.392.2569) info@exablox.com www.exablox.com 2014 Exablox and the Exablox logo are trademarks of Exablox, Inc. 02/14 EX007