Engineering Company Saves $7,000,000 on 300TB with CentreStack



We recently worked with an engineering company that had accumulated 300TB of data on-premises. They have over 1,000 employees across 83 locations generating about 10 TB of new data per month as they provide analysis of design failures and expert testimony for any associated legal proceedings. 

By their estimates, housing this data on-premises costs them an average of $2,000 / TB / month after adding up all the management and infrastructure costs associated with the required deployment. 

They decided to migrate all 300 TB to the cloud to cut costs since SharePoint's costs per TB are comparatively low at $190/TB. However, they soon realized that they really didn't require constant, expensive access to all 300 TB so they elected to save even more by moving the majority of their storage to a cloud-based archive. 

But there was a catch. Even though they were essentially archiving the data, they needed it to remain easily accessible as if it were still on a file server. 

Using CentreStack to provide a front-end for Azure blob storage reduced monthly storage costs to $30 / TB. They could have brought this down further to $6 per TB by using Wasabi storage but elected to focus on using Microsoft's infrastructure.


Here's a breakdown of their savings:

Total cost before migration: $600,000 per month

  • 300 TB on-premises: $600,000 per month

Total cost after migration: $16,000 per month

  • 30 TB in SharePoint: $5,700 per month
  • 20 TB in Azure Files: $3,200 per month
  • 250 TB in Azure Blob: $5,100 per month
Projected Annual Savings: $7,008,000

Using CentreStack as a Remote Access Archive to Save Money

These kinds of savings are not exclusive to large-scale storage deployments. For example, SharePoint only includes 1 TB of storage for free (plus 10GB per user). After that, it's $190 per TB. So there's still an opportunity to save by carefully considering the costs for different storage services:

  • SharePoint: $190 / TB / month
  • Azure Files: $160 / TB / month
  • Azure Blob: $20 / TB / month
  • Wasabi: $6 / TB / month
(Please note that these prices are estimated to provide a rough idea of the comparative costs and that you may need to use the services native cost calculators to factor in scale, reservations, etc... )

There's another salient source of savings: the ability to combine low-cost archive storage with a remotely accessible file system interface to save money. 

In smaller deployment, replicating local storage to the cloud as an offsite backup that is also remotely accessible as a file system can eliminate the costs of an offsite backup solution. 

If you'd like to discuss this in greater detail, please send an email to ticket@gladinet.com


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