Enabling TCO Reduction: Simplicity is Tangible

A reduction in infrastructure total cost of ownership can mean lowered expenses as well as corollary advantages: increased employee productivity, agility, and time savings. The benefits are clear. Charting a path to it is more ambiguous.

By definition, the total cost of ownership (TCO) is the purchase price of an asset plus the costs of operation. Assessing the total cost of ownership represents taking a broader look at what problem we’re solving, the solution, and the solution’s efficacy over time. Buyers need to look beyond the short-term price, or purchase price, and understand the long-term price. In other words, conversations revolving around TCO reduction need to factor in the core element of TCO analysis: the effectiveness of a solution in addressing the most impactful requirements.

The Costs of Complexity

With data management, particularly in data protection, IT leaders need to look for a solution that has a curtailed number of components and increases administrator efficiency. A solution that supports TCO reduction initiatives is one that reduces silos and addresses fundamental pain points that users face. This is how you optimize TCO efficacy: solve user needs while thwarting complexity.

With Cohesity, customers report a dramatically reduced TCO. Alongside decreased costs, they’re seeing multiple hours saved weekly, freeing up their team to focus on impactful, overarching KPIs, in contrast to managing infrastructure components. Legacy solutions revolve around the latter and are comprised of multiple point elements, leading to data fragmentation across silos. As a result, managing backup and recovery is not only hard—it’s expensive. Cohesity simplifies backup and recovery with a single software-defined solution, and collapsing silos in the process.

Simplicity Has its Benefits

Cohesity simplifies infrastructure, and reduces TCO, in a number of ways. The principal advantages of Cohesity are:

• Consolidation of multiple, single-point solutions — media servers, master servers, target storage, and cloud gateways — on one software-defined solution
• Simplified global management with one UI
• Dramatically reduced data footprint with global variable length, sliding window, deduplication and compression
• Non-disruptive upgrades that increase uptime and reduce management time

These advantages all support a narrative built around simplicity: simplified infrastructure and simplified management. Simplicity is directly responsible for reducing costs and the time needed for management. Simplicity is tangible. Customers are seeing a ripple effect of value creation, experiencing quantifiable benefits:

1. Decreased management time — freeing up your team’s time to focus on more strategic initiatives
2. Decreased data footprint — allowing you to do more with less

A Productivity Time Machine

Large customers look for simplified operations and lower costs. With massive workloads under management, many customers need a modern approach to data management. Schneider Electric manages approximately 300TB of data, growing at 12% per year, with many applications and workloads shifting to the cloud. Schneider Electric’s production environment encompasses 28 sites, with >1600 VMs under management. There are a number of components and a massive dataset, increasing room for complexity.

The biggest complaint from IT was the complexity within their legacy backup infrastructure. Legacy solutions put a strain on management time and costs. With the incumbent infrastructure, a full backup took more than 40 hours, and backup storage and maintenance costs were more than $20K per year. For Schneider Electric, the answer was simple: they needed a new solution.

In defining a new solution, Schneider Electric’s requirements were clear:

• Enterprise-class backup and recovery with strong performance and a lower TCO
• Simplified management and administration for a hybrid-cloud environment
• The ability to migrate off legacy backup file storage
• Seamless management of remote site data protection

Schneider Electric chose Cohesity to satisfy their needs, and they’re seeing dramatic results:

• CapEx and OpEx savings of >$60K per year
• Data recovery times reduced by over 70%
• A data reduction rate of 20x, owing to global, variable-length deduplication and compression
• A gain of multiple hours per week, owing to faster backup times and native integrations with the leading public clouds

With Cohesity, beyond significant financial and storage benefits, Schneider Electric was able to eliminate time spent on maintenance and troubleshooting. Modern solutions don’t just dole out a list of features—they identify and address the most impactful needs of their users. For Schneider Electric, Cohesity provided the most impactful benefit: time.

Smaller Footprint, Bigger Savings

Other customers benefit from dramatic space savings. Cohesity curtails space utilization by leveraging global, variable-length deduplication and compression. Many customers are able to do more—store more of their data and leverage data for a competitive advantage—on less storage. AutoNation is one of these customers.

AutoNation manages over 1.2PB of data. As a result of relying on legacy solutions for data protection, managing this amass of data is not trivial. AutoNation’s IT team experienced a gamut of challenges at an alarming cadence, including up to 6,000 backup failures per month which required a dedicated staff member, solely for troubleshooting.

AutoNation strived for their next infrastructure solution to provide:

• A web-scale architecture with a predictable cost model
• The ability to protect, store, and manage data with a next-generation solution
• Capabilities beyond modern backup and recovery
• Single pane of glass management with a hybrid, multi-cloud approach

After using Cohesity to manage their data, AutoNation substantially enhanced operational capabilities, improved reliability, decreased management complexity, and lowered its TCO.

With Cohesity, AutoNation saved more than 60 percent compared with SAN, owing to a dramatically smaller data footprint. They were able to manage a large, and growing, volume of data using less than half of the storage footprint required by other solutions.

A Consistent Theme

Customers in a myriad of sectors are all experiencing the benefits of Cohesity—a decreased data footprint, greater productivity, and reduced TCO. The underlying factor is simplicity spurred from the adoption of a modern, holistic solution. As seen from Schneider Electric and AutoNation, simplicity can be visible, quantifiable, and tangible.

Learn more about the tangible benefits of Cohesity by reading the stories of more customers who have saved with Cohesity:

• Read how XO Communications, a Verizon company, not only reduced its TCO by 60% but was also able to leverage backup data for accelerating development and testing.
• Learn how Vita Group saved over $500k and reduced management time by 3x.
• Discover how Piedmont Healthcare saved 40% in CapEx and freed up 60% of its storage capacity with Cohesity deduplication — all at one-fifth the time.

Read more.