Are you tired of paying the hefty license prices and maintenance fees for backup software? Have you been paying too much for target storage? Are you feeling like all this money is going to waste just for storing data that will remain unproductive until disaster strikes?
If so, you’re in good company. Virtually all the customers and prospects we speak with tell us a similar story. Data protection is too expensive, doesn’t produce enough value, and is just too complex.
It really comes down to this: customers are paying more today for data protection than for the best of breed, all-flash primary storage! And that isn’t right. Primary storage is running your mission-critical applications, supporting the lifeblood of the business. While your legacy backup environment is only providing an insurance policy.
How did we get here? Companies like Pure Storage have changed the game for primary storage by making all-flash cost-effective and simple. On the other hand, legacy data protection hasn’t evolved, and customers are still stuck dealing with legacy.
The high-level math is simple. Primary all-flash storage costs about $8-$12 / raw GB street, and after dedupe and compression comes down to $2-$3 / front-end GB street1 . Now let’s compare that to the price of data protection. Data Domain costs about $2 / front-end GB street2 . Add to that the cost of legacy backup software for another $4 / front-end GB street3 . And that’s how data protection costs more than primary all-flash storage! Just for an insurance policy that will remain unproductive 99% of the time.
CAPEX per front-end GB
Assumptions:
- Based on street pricing estimates, for example. Assumes a 4X data reduction ratio.
- Assumes Data Domain list price of $3,800 / back-end TB list. After 50% discount, and accounting for 30 days retention and data reduction, results in about $2 / front-end TB street. This number will vary depending on dedupe ratios, data retention period, change rates, etc.
- Based on a typical license cost of about $8K / front-end TB list for Veritas NetBackup or CommVault Simpana DPA. Assumes a 50% discount.
Cohesity reduces data protection TCO by 70%
The good news is that Cohesity can have a dramatic impact on the cost of data protection. We have a unique approach to data protection with a distributed, hyperconverged platform that converges both target storage and backup. We simplify the environment by eliminating data protection silos (target storage, media servers, master servers) and providing a single point of management. But we also reduce CAPEX by replacing expensive purpose-built hardware (eg Data Domain) and backup licenses (eg Veritas NetBackup) with a single software-defined solution running on scale-out x86 systems.
To illustrate the point, we ran the numbers for a scenario consisting of:
- 1000 Virtual Machines, each with 150 GB of data (total 150 TB of production data)
- 100 TB of database data running on physical servers
This leads to a total of 250TB of production data (front-end), consuming about 155TB of dedupe storage capacity (back-end). The table below details the capacity requirements.
We applied these capacity requirements to two different configurations. The legacy approach consists of EMC Data Domain dedupe storage and Veritas NetBackup software. In the Cohesity scenario, we replace both with Cohesity DataPlatform and DataProtect. All costs are based on list prices for simplicity (given that discounts and net prices will vary by customer).
Even better – once the data is protected on Cohesity, it’s no longer just an idle insurance policy. The data on Cohesity can be put to productive use. For example, it can be cloned instantly and presented as test/dev data. Or, custom analytics jobs can be executed directly on Cohesity. And last but not least, it can easily be tiered to the cloud for long-term archival or replication.
Online TCO Calculator
Do you want to run your own scenarios? Try out our online TCO calculator here https://www.cohesity.com/forms/analyst-report/forrester-tei-study/. It’s a simple and quick estimate but will give you a flavor of what you can achieve in your environment. As a side note – the calculator has an option to include the cost of long-term retention and compare the costs of tape (legacy config) with cloud (Cohesity config). That can make the TCO even more attractive. It’s an interesting topic that we didn’t cover in this blog – but a good topic to cover in an upcoming blog.
