Beth Pariseau at TechTarget has an interesting article this week about how a combination of storage tiering and dedupe are just right in these recessionary times. It talks in some depth about Ocarina’s deployment at Rainmaker Entertainment on BlueArc and Isilon.
The article is worth a read all the way through, as it gives some real-life examples of two very different ways that tiered storage and data deduplication together added up to storage savings. For example, Clackamas County in Oregon was able to reduce storage costs by utilizing a combination of F5 for migration to lower tiers and Data Domain to dedupe archives.
Christopher Fricke, senior IT administrator for the county is quoted in the article saying: “…It helps us not have to chase capacity while we go through a budget crunch — we can focus on performance rather than capacity…”
The article also delves into how a combination of migration and dedupe/compression can greatly reduce storage costs and simplify life at entertainment studios. Rainmaker, a digital animation studio, deployed Ocarina in order to ensure that they could keep all their files online, rather than having to back up to tape while in the midst of a project.
The article quotes Ron Stinson, Rainmaker’s director of IT and operations, who said: “We’re looking at compressing 6 terabytes down to two, and possibly storing 300 terabytes on the Isilon system in the future.”
A very interesting set of use cases that help highlight the value of dedupe in very practical ways.
