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A Boatload Of Data – How To Reduce Server Space

I work at an organization that helps clients get data under control and will be posting regularly on client stories that I

I work at an organization that helps clients get data under control and will be posting regularly on client stories that I find interesting.

– Jeff Laubhan, Waterford Technologies

In talking with a client today that is rolling out our fileArchiver solution, he brought up very interesting numbers. He has 2,700,000 images that he wants to move to cheaper disk. At an average size of 5MB that is approximately 13,500,000 MB or 13,500 GB (Gigabytes) or 13.5 TB (Terabytes) of data sitting on an expensive HP Windows 2012 server. It’s been a few years since he bought it butReduce server space remembers spending north of $50,000 for a capacity he’s quickly filling up. He spent a few thousand dollars and bought a Drobo device with 10 TB of SATA drives for his archive. He has the capacity to expand it if needed.

Reduce Server Space

His goal is to get the 13.5 TB down to a maximum of 5 TB of data. Based on the analysis he ran this would leave approximately 2 years on the server and stub/archive everything else off to cheaper disk. He estimates that 8% of his data is duplicates so that will also free up space. He’s also expecting to get about 500 GB in savings just by deleting older files that are no longer needed. Ironically enough the IT group seemed to be the biggest culprit hoarding away old printer drives, SQL server service packs, back up tapes, and tons of older data that is irrelevant these days. I’ll post more as the implementation progresses.

For more info on server space reduction read about FileArchiver