2020 has been a challenging year, and one of the most important challenges for technicians for 2021 is overseeing software investments. Now, according to Gartner, IT spending is growing rapidly again. At the same time, the increase in the IT budget comes from other departments. The choice of software will depend on more characteristics than usual:
- Product quality - you can see it for yourself
- Price - we are confident that our prices are competitive
- Return on investment - we can provide you with this information
And the question is not only about the functionality and performance of the product. Technical experts must demonstrate that the product will be useful both for their primary purposes and for the business as a whole. At the moment of making a decision. With the CTO, CIO, CFO, and people in control of spending sitting at the same table, and the Covid-19 pandemic is still ongoing, our guide can be very helpful.
In other words, it is now important to justify the cost of IT. And when the cost brings the business ROI, you win.
2. How Zextras Suite helps you save money
Zextras Suite helps you save money in various ways:
- — , , .
- — , , .
- HSM ( ) — . , . .
- — - . Zextras Suite
The combination of these methods is the most important component of our product. Using them correctly will help your company save more than you will spend on licensing Zextras Suite.
In addition, our platform guarantees you 100% security of your data.
Using all of these techniques will not affect the data itself or its quality. What's more, the integration with object storage ensures that you don't run out of space, which means that all your data will always be stored at a lower cost.
2.1 Data Compression
Storing corporate data and its backups, which are growing rapidly, requires the purchase of more and more expensive storage devices, if you do not use data compression.
Zextras Smart Storage Management uses real-time data compression using the gzip algorithm. When using this technique, gzip scans files for duplicate lines of data in the file.
In this process, all repeated sequences of characters are replaced with a reference to the corresponding string that was encountered before. In theory, compression using this method can be as high as 10: 1, that is, up to 90% savings in disk space.
The size after compression can vary depending on many factors, so the final compression percentage cannot be accurately predicted. However, practice has shown that this method can, on average, save about 35% of disk space when compressing data such as text that is specific to a mail server.
Why you need compression
Compression allows you to:
- Use your storage more efficiently
- Defer the need to expand storage
- Buy time to better assess your storage expansion needs.
- Savings due to compression
Let's calculate how much you can save with compression Compression
Savings = Storage Cost × Compression
Percentage (Compression Percentage = 1 - 1 / Compression Ratio)
- Compression savings are money you save by compressing data
- Storage cost is the cost of storage, including price, maintenance, etc.
- Compression percentage is the percentage of memory that is freed after the data is compressed.
- — , , , , , 5: 1 , 5 (, 5 ) 1 (, 1 )
Compression use case
Let's calculate the savings achieved by compressing 1 TB of data, assuming:
Compression ratio is 1.54: 1 (depending on data properties),
Average cost of storing 1 TB of data is $ 3,000 per year (including maintenance costs ).
Based on the above assumptions, after compression, the amount of storage required would be reduced to 0.65TB, a 0.35TB reduction in required space, corresponding to a 35% cost savings.
Compression Ratio = 1-1 / Compression Ratio = 1-1 / 1.54 = 0.35
Compression Savings = Storage Cost × Compression Rate = 3,000 ($ / year per TB) × 0.35 = 1,050 ($ / year per TB)
Estimated Total Uncompressed Cost = $ 3000 per year for each TB of data,
Total Estimated Compressed Cost = $ 1950 per year for each TB of data,
Savings = $ 1050 per year for each TB of data.
2.2 Deduplication
Given the explosive growth of information, data deduplication plays an important role in reducing costs.
Zimbra's built-in deduplication runs into limited cache, while Zextras Intelligent Storage Management deduplication continues to work regardless of cache or item time.
Data deduplication plays an important role in storage availability given the explosive growth of data these days.
Reducing costs is one of the important benefits of deduplication. Other benefits include reducing the cost of storage, hardware and server room space, reducing energy consumption for cooling, and labor costs because the amount of equipment that needs to be maintained and maintained is reduced.
These improvements in storage efficiency help companies remove data growth constraints, improve service levels, and thus become more competitive.
The amount of duplicated data in an infrastructure can vary in characteristics and in the nature of data access.
However, you can roughly calculate the amount of duplicate data in your IT infrastructure. For example, files created by office workers often contain redundant data and are often sent in bulk by colleagues or copied.
This is especially true for large corporations that send emails to all employees. In such infrastructures, the effect of deduplication will be maximum.
Why you need deduplication
Deduplication allows you to:
- Free up space on your storage device to use it more efficiently
- Eliminate the need to regularly expand storage
- Improve the performance of your server.
Let's calculate how much you can save with deduplication:
Savings from deduplication = storage cost × percentage of deduplication
(Percentage of deduplication = 1 - 1 / Deduplication ratio)
- Deduplication savings are the amount you save by using deduplication
- Storage cost is the cost of storage, including price, maintenance, etc.
- Deduplication percentage is the percentage of memory that is freed by deduplication,
- The deduplication ratio is the ratio of logical data to the physical space required to store deduplicated data. For example, a deduplication ratio of 5: 1 means that 5 units of logical data (for example, 5 TB) are stored in 1 unit of physical disk space (for example, 1 TB)
Deduplication use case
Let's calculate the savings achieved by deduplicating 1 TB of data, assuming that:
- The deduplication ratio is 1.11: 1 (depending on the number of objects),
- The average cost of storing 1 TB of data is $ 3,000 per year (including maintenance costs).
Based on the above assumptions, after deduplication, the required storage will be reduced to 0.9 TB. This will free up an additional 0.1 TB and save 10% of the cost.
Percentage Deduplication = 1 - 1 / Deduplication Ratio = 1-1 / 1.11 = 0.1
Savings with Deduplication = Storage Cost × Percentage Deduplication = $ 3000 / TB per year) × 0.1 = $ 300 / TB per year
Total Estimated non-deduplicated cost = $ 3000 / year for each TB of data,
Total estimated cost with deduplication = $ 2700 / year for each TB of data,
Savings = $ 300 / year for each TB of data.
The deduplication factor is a function of the objects on the server. This means that the more emails you store on your server, the higher the deduplication rate becomes, and the greater the savings.
The impact of deduplication on memory savings is not intuitive, because even with very modest ratios, large savings are achieved, and even with small increases in deduplication ratios, there are huge savings in terms of disk space. As you can see in the graph and table, even a small change in the deduplication ratio results in large storage savings. This means that deduplication can be beneficial even with a small ratio.
Savings are a factor of (1-1 / r), so for a deduplication factor of 3, the savings would be 2/3, or roughly 66%. A factor of 1 means there is no duplicate deduplication data, which means there is no space savings.
2.3 Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM)
Not all users access all of their data often enough, and this rule can be used to save money.
The basic idea behind HSM technology is that not all data is accessed by users often enough. So why not move your least used data to slower and cheaper storage, and your most used data to faster and more expensive, to save on costs and improve the user experience.
Hierarchical Storage Management, or HSM, is a technology that allows data to be moved between storage devices based on a predefined policy.
Most often, this technology is used to move old data from faster, but more expensive, storage to slower, but cheaper, because old data is usually used less frequently. At the same time, users will not feel the slowdown, while using slower storage is much cheaper.
Improving the user experience isn't the only benefit of HSM. In fact, it can reduce storage costs for the company, as it not only saves money that would be spent on faster storage systems, but also reduces the cost of building the architecture, leaving the actual mail data on a smaller disk.
Why do you need HSM
All companies are facing exponential demand for storage capacity. However, research shows that about 60% of the data in the warehouse is rarely used or not used at all. It is extremely difficult to assess the benefits of using HSM in your infrastructure. It is not really a question of how useful HSM can be, since its benefits have already been proven in practice. The question is whether to implement HSM at all, since initially Zimbra OSE does not support this technology at all.
Zextras Smart Storage Management enables Zimbra OSE to integrate fully featured HSM technology that will give you many benefits.
Here are some examples of how HSM can optimize the use of existing company resources without having to buy new hardware. HSM also saves money by moving most of your company's data to slower devices, especially if your company has a lot of data stored.
Saving time is another important benefit that is usually overlooked. Optimizing the delivery of data to the user has an obvious impact on the experience of interacting with the information system. Archiving backups on lower-tier devices, because they are rarely used, increases the chances that your data will remain intact if lost or damaged on frequently used devices.
Let's calculate how much you can save with HSM
Savings with HSM = Amount of data in slow storage × difference in cost between stores
= Amount of data in slow storage × Cost of fast storage × (1 - Cost Ratio)
(Cost Ratio = Cost of Slow Storage / Fast storage cost)
- Savings when using HSM are the savings you get by migrating data to slower storage.
- Storage cost difference is the difference between fast and slow storage per storage unit, including price, maintenance, etc.
Another important factor is the cost of transferring data to another storage. The big advantage of Zextras Suite is that you can perform live migrations to migrate data. To do this, you do not have to turn off the server, which means no downtime. With Zextras Suite, you can seamlessly migrate data, upgrade hardware, and expand storage.
HSM Usage Scenario
Let's calculate the savings when using an HSM on 1 TB of data, assuming that:
- Fresh emails make up 20% of the total data (depending on the policy you set up, specifying the time period for emails after which they should be migrated to the low-level device),
- 1 $3000 ( ),
- 25%
Based on the assumptions above, 80% of all data is moved to the low-level device. Apart from all the optimization benefits, it frees up 80% of the storage, which gives you cost savings in terms of the difference in price between the two storages. It also gives you extra time to more accurately estimate the amount of storage you need to purchase.
Considering that the cost of slow storage is 25% less than fast storage, we get:
Cost ratio = Cost of slow storage / Cost of fast storage = 0.75.
Savings with HSM = Slow Storage Data × Fast Storage Cost × (1 - Cost Ratio) = 0.8TB × $ 3000 / year per TB) × (1 - 0.75) = $ 600 / year per TB of data.
Estimated total cost without HSM = $ 3000 / year for each TB of data,
Total estimated cost with HSM = $ 2400 / year for each TB of data,
Savings = $ 600 / year for each TB of data.
2.4 Integration of Object Storage The
frequently changing cost of local storage makes it nearly impossible to estimate, while the cost of object storage is always fixed and easy to estimate. In addition, you will only pay for the space you actually use.
Object storage is a data management technology that treats storage data as separate units, so-called objects. These objects are stored in a single repository and are not collected into files and folders. Instead, Object Storage combines the chunks of data that make up the file, appends all relevant metadata to it, and attaches a custom ID.
Moving away from local storage, some of which is almost always idle, even though you have already paid for it, can play a big role in reducing costs. You can get as much space as you need and only pay for what you actually use.
Object Storage Scenario
Example 1
Imagine that you are a service provider who needs to store your customers' data. You should estimate the amount of local storage required. After making the calculations, you will buy storage, paying for them in advance.
There are two problems with this situation.
First, you may not know ahead of time how many clients you will have. Therefore, you may have underestimated the amount of disk space that you will need, and you cannot solve this problem here and now. You will have to look for additional servers, purchase them, wait for them to be delivered and set up for use. At this time, customers may get tired of waiting and simply change their provider.
Secondly, if the client left you or reduced the amount of stored data, then you will have unused servers. This also applies to large online events that are held once a year or just once. In such cases, the company needs many servers to process huge amounts of data, but once the event is over, the servers are no longer needed.
Example 2
Imagine you need to buy storage for a company with 1000 employees. You decide to give each user 10GB of storage. The total storage capacity is 10 TB, which is beyond your budget. Therefore, you decide to purchase a storage system at the rate of 5 GB per user, but after a while you realize that this is not enough, and you have to buy new storage again, which means that you will have to calculate the space required for data storage again. If you don't have a clear idea of the amount of storage you need, you will never find a middle ground.
Alternatively, you can consider using Object Storage, which not only does not cost you the cost of using and maintaining the storage locally, but also costs as much as you use up the storage space. Thus, you will be able to kill two birds with one stone.
To summarize, you should remember that the total cost of ownership (TCO) is made up of capital costs (CAPEX), including development and implementation costs, and operating costs (OPEX), which include daily operations, maintenance and electricity. With the transition to object storage, the total cost of ownership decreases by at least 30% over a 3-year period, and has only increased over time.
Savings in 3 years = TCO for local storage × reduction factor
Savings from object storage integration = ~ $ 3000 / year per TB × 3 years × 0.3 = $ 2700 / TB for 3 years
The problem with purchasing storage is that the cost depends on the space purchased, not actually used, therefore you will have to pay for the unused space as well. When using object storage, you only pay for the space used.
3. Practical cases
3.1 Use case 1
With Zextras Suite, you can move your data to two local storages with different access times to implement the HSM strategy. In addition to this, you will get the benefits of deduplication and compression. Each of these features reduces your costs.
Let's try to calculate how much you will save each year with a different number of mailboxes, assuming that:
- The quota of each mailbox is 10 GB
- The price of 1 TB of high-speed and more expensive storage is $ 650
- 1TB of slower and less expensive storage costs $ 100
- Deduplication rate is 10%
- The compression percentage is 35%
- Top-level vault stores mail for the last 15 days
- The average amount of data used by one user per day is approximately 10 MB
For 1000 boxes:
Investment (Annual cost of Zextras Suite Basic) = $ 7276.27
Savings when using Deduplication = Storage cost × Percentage of deduplication = 1000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) × 650 ($ / TB) × 0.1 = $ 650
Savings in use Compression = Storage Cost × Compression Percentage = 1000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) × 650 ($ / TB) × 0.35 = $ 2275
Savings on HSM and cheaper drives in low-tier storage = Data in slow storage × Price difference between storages = (1000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) - 1000 (boxes) × 0.00001 (TB / box) × 15 (days)) × (650 ($) - 100 ($)) = $ 5417.5
Total savings = 650 + 2275 + 5417.5 = $ 8342.5
Return = Total Savings - Investment = 8342.5 - 7276.27 = $ 1066.23
ROI = Return / Investment × 100 = 1066.23 / 7276.27 × 100 = 15%
For 5000 boxes:
Investment (Annual cost of Zextras Suite Basic) = $ 34130.86
Savings when using Deduplication = Storage Cost × Deduplication rate = 5000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) × 650 ($ / TB) × 0.1 = $ 3250
Compression savings = Storage cost × Compression rate = 5000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) × 650 ( $ / TB) × 0.35 = $ 11375
Savings with HSM and cheaper drives in low-tier storage = Data in slow storage × Price difference between storage = (5000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) - 5000 (boxes) × 0.00001 (TB / box) × 15 ( days)) × (650 ($) - 100 ($)) = $ 27087.5
Total savings = 3250 + 11375 + 27087.5 = $ 41712.5
Return = Total savings - investment = 41712.5 - 34130.86 = $ 7581.64
ROI = Return / Investment × 100 = 7581.64 / 34130.86 × 100 = 22%
For 10,000 boxes:
Investment (Annual cost of Zextras Suite Basic) = $ 66,930.45
Savings when using Deduplication = Cost of storage × Percentage of deduplication = 10,000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) × 650 ($ / TB) × 0.1 = $ 6500
Savings with Compression = Storage Cost × Compression Rate = 10,000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) × 650 ($ / TB) × 0.35 = $ 22,750
Savings with HSM and cheaper drives in low-tier storage = Data in slow storage × Price difference between storages = (10,000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) - 10,000 (boxes) × 0.00001 (TB / box) × 15 (days)) × (650 ($) - 100 ($)) = $ 54175
Total Savings = 6500 + 22750 + 54175 = $ 83425
Return = Total Savings - Investment = 83425 - 66930.45 = $ 16,494.55
ROI = Return / Investment × 100 = 16494.55 / 66930.45 × 100 = 25% 3.2 Use Case
2
With Zextras Suite, you can transfer your data to two storages. To implement the HSM strategy, the top tier contains emails from the last 15 days in local storage, and the bottom tier uses AWS S3 Object Storage with standard infrequent access. In addition to this, you will get the benefits of deduplication and compression on the primary storage. Each of these features reduces your costs.
Let's try to calculate how much you will save in three years with a different number of mailboxes, assuming that:
- The quota of each mailbox is 10 GB
- The price of 1 TB of high-speed and more expensive storage is $ 650
- The price of 1 TB of object storage is $ 150
- Deduplication rate is 10%
- The compression percentage is 35%
- 15
- , 10
For 1000 boxes:
Investment (Annual cost of Zextras Suite Basic) = $ 7276.27
Savings when using Deduplication = Storage cost × Percentage of deduplication = 1000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) × 650 ($ / TB) × 0.1 = $ 650
Savings in use Compression = Storage Cost × Compression Percentage = 1000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) × 650 ($ / TB) × 0.35 = $ 2275
Savings with HSM and Object Storage = Data in Slow Storage × Price Difference Between Stores = ( 1000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) - 1000 (boxes) × 0.00001 (TB / box) × 15 (days)) × (650 ($) - 150 ($)) = $ 4925
Total savings = 650 + 2275 + 4925 = $ 7850
Return = Total Savings - Investment = 7850 - 7276.27 = $ 573.73
ROI = Return / Investment × 100 = 573.73 / 7276.27 × 100 = 8%
For 5000 boxes:
Investment (Annual cost of Zextras Suite Basic) = $ 34130.86
Savings when using Deduplication = Cost of storage × Percentage of deduplication = 5000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) × 650 ($ / TB) × 0.1 = $ 3250
Savings on Compression = Storage Cost × Compression Rate = 5000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) × 650 ($ / TB) × 0.35 = $ 11375
Savings on HSM and object storage = Data in slow storage × Price difference between storages = (5000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) - 5000 (boxes) × 0.00001 (TB / box) × 15 (days)) × (650 ($ ) - 150 ($)) = $ 24625
Total Savings = 3250 + 11375 + 24625 = $ 39250
Return = Total Savings - Investment = 39250 - 34130.86 = $ 5119.14
ROI = Return / Investment × 100 = 5119.14 / 34130.86 × 100 = 15%
For 10,000 boxes:
Investment (Annual cost of Zextras Suite Basic) = $ 66930.45
Savings when using Deduplication = Cost of storage × Deduplication rate = 10,000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) × 650 ($ / TB) × 0.1 = $ 6500
Compression savings = Storage cost × Compression rate = 10,000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) × 650 ( $ / TB) × 0.35 = $ 22750
Savings with HSM and Object Storage = Data in slow storage × Storage price difference = (10,000 (boxes) × 0.01 (TB / box) - 10,000 (boxes) × 0.00001 (TB / box) × 15 (days)) × (650 ($) - 150 ($)) = $ 49250
Total Savings = 6500 + 22750 + 49250 = $ 78500
Return = Total Savings - Investment = 78500 - 66930.45 = $ 11569.55
ROI = Return / Investment × 100 = 11569.55 / 66930.45 × 100 = 17 %
4. Bottom Line
In this article, we have demonstrated how one element of our solution , responsible for managing storage, allows your company to start saving money before you start using the full capabilities of the product.
Zextras Suite can cost less than the amount you can save with this solution, and best of all, the platform includes many more features than just storage management. Real-time backup, co-authoring and collaboration tools are just a few of the improvements for your Zimbra OSE. You can find out about the functions on our website .
For all questions related to Zextras Suite Pro and Team Pro, you can contact the Representative of Zextras Technology Ekaterina Triandafilidi by e-mail ekaterina.triandafilidi@zextras.com