What Kind of ROI Do You Need To Bring A Technology In-House?

by Eric Burgener, VP Product Management

Posted Tuesday, July 12, 2011 in Technology          0 comments

Tags: dedupe, Hyper-V, Virsto VDI, Virsto VSI, virtualization, VMware

We’re probably all generally aware that deduplication technology has entered the market pretty successfully.  A recent survey done by TechTarget (May 2011) indicated that slightly more than 60% of respondents are using dedupe in backup, and 57% of the respondents who are not using dedupe expect to implement it within 2 years.  There are lots of vendors playing in this space, the first multi-billion dollar acquisition (Data Domain) has occurred, and storage capacity optimization (SCO) technologies are also starting to worm their way into primary storage environments, with at least one telling acquisition already behind us there (IBM’s acquisition of Storwize).  The headliner benefit of dedupe?  Storage capacity savings.  Survey responses indicated that, on average, survey respondents saved 43% on their disk capacity consumption for backup.  That’s almost a no-brainer.

Whether you deploy dedupe technology through appliances, backup software, or virtual tape libraries, it’s not cheap.  But that doesn’t really matter, because it pays.  If before dedupe you were maintaining a 50TB secondary storage (i.e. backup) capacity, that would have on average have dropped to around 28TB.  That 22TB savings, if we assume a $/GB price for midrange, raw disk capacity at around $15/GB (add up the cost of the cabinet, trays, I/O modules and disks and divide by usable raw capacity), is over $300K.  Let’s say you spent $150K on your dedupe infrastructure – that still leaves you with $150K savings pretty much right off the bat, plus you get the added advantages of faster backups, probably faster restores (because you’re transferring the smaller, deduped amount across the network), energy savings, and less secondary storage to manage.  And you get to leverage this type of savings moving forward as your primary storage environment grows to help keep backup issues (time, capacity, costs) in check.

If payback like that meets your ROI requirements, what about if you could enjoy additional storage capacity savings of that magnitude for $2,800 per host in your virtual environments?  Check this out:

• The average Virsto customer uses 74% less storage capacity than they did before they deployed us (without counting any backup capacity savings) – on the example above, that would have resulted in over $550K of savings, $225K MORE than dedupe; $330K or $555K savings - which would you choose?  how about both?
• Unlike dedupe where there is a question of whether or not it may impact performance, Virsto uses a unique logging architecture to sequentialize hypervisor I/O, significantly improving performance (specifically IOPS/spindle)
• By moving your storage solution (whatever it is) to a much higher utilization rate, we increase the virtual machine density that any given storage configuration supports by at least 2x

These numbers are based on joint testing Virsto did with Microsoft at their Enterprise Engineering Center in Redmond, WA in the last 6 months and validated by an independent third party (the Veritest arm of Lionbridge).  If you’d like more info on these tests, please contact us and we can share the performance white paper on them.

Using Virsto isn’t an either/or proposition when it comes to dedupe – we can be deployed with dedupe.  If we’re deployed with it, we reduce the amount of primary storage you have to back up, which reduces your secondary storage as well.  That’s before any storage capacity optimization benefits you may get from the dedupe technology.  Much of that 74% savings above comes from our very efficient thin provisioning implementation, so it won’t conflict with the benefits dedupe can provide.  Or deploy us without it - either way, you get substantial savings even if you just look at capacity, forget about how much you save from the reduced spindle count that comes from at least tripling the IOPS that you'd get out of your current thin provisioned virtual disks.

But, you might say, I'm not using thin provisioned virtual disks.  Why not?  Their poor performance.  Wait, you at least triple performance of the Hyper-V VHDs?  OK, now I'm starting to get it.  Thin provision my VHDs to save on capacity, but still get the performance I need for my production environment...

You may have already decided what kinds of capacity savings it takes to bring storage capacity optimization technology into your shop, and Virsto will likely beat that ROI by a handy amount.  Plus it will speed up the storage you already have (or any new storage you want to buy) and give you scalable, high performance snapshot technology that outperforms what you’d get on high end enterprise-class arrays using any block-based storage on the back end.  But don't forget - this type of savings could be additive to anything you get with dedupe.

Now that really is a no-brainer.