Storage Forecaster™ Service

Save millions in storage costs by being able to forecast data storage growth.

With the Storage Forecaster Service, I.T. Departments can do capacity planning in their data storage and data backup systems more accurately then ever before. With Storage Forecaster, organizations can run data use simulations of their current storage environment to more precisely gauge how much storage they will consume whether on disk or on tape. Running simulations have never been easier. With the Storage Forecaster Flight Simulator, organizations can alter the simulated backup jobs on the fly in order to see the financial impact and storage resources used without ever affecting your production backup environment. Comprehensive reports provide quantitative analysis, graphical pattern analysis and financial impact reports.

Until now, accurately calculating how much storage you use in your backup environment was an impossible task. Companies unable to conduct accurate capacity planning can expect to experience interruptions of service, emergency expenditures and lost business.

How much will it cost you this year to run your backup environment with increasing data growth rates?
How many tapes do you burn through?
How much disk does your virtual tape library (VTL) use?
Can your deduplication storage withstand a legal-hold? Two legal-holds? Three?

The Problem

Accurate capacity planning is very difficult and not doing it, or doing it incorrectly is costly and can result in a major data loss.

Who it effects

I.T. Departments worry about systems being in jeopardy and failing to meet service levels.
Business Managers fret over the expense involved in ever increasing data growth rates.

The Solution

The Storage Forecaster Service makes it easy to do capacity planning for a fraction of the cost of traditional, less accurate methods.

Traditional capacity planning methods don't work.

Typically, businesses make an educated guess of how much storage they are going to need to purchase each year for their backup environments because it's difficult to calculate how much storage they'll burn through. Most organizations send out more tapes than they receive from off-site storage, or write more data to disk than they can reclaim due to lengthy data retention requirements and increasing data growth rates. This means that businesses often find themselves running out of tapes or disk space and have to rush to buy more. This results in backups failing due to a lack of storage resources, an inability to recover lost data, being unable to meet SLAs, and falling out of compliance. Additionally, legal-holds can wreak havoc on an I.T. Departments ability to manage storage due to the 'freezing' of data that may be required for e-discovery.

Disk based backups and VTLs are not exempt from the same challenges of calculating consumption. In fact, the financial impact of not being able to forecast your disk usage in your backup environment are substantially larger and will have a significantly larger impact in your data center as well.

A new, sophisticated approach to forecasting.

Backup environments are very complex systems and in order to employ them better, we've developed a new, sophisticated approach to forecasting based on system dynamics modeling. Storage Forecaster takes the complexity out of forecasting your data storage systems by modeling the natural feedback loops in your environment to forecast how much media (disk or tape) that you'll use over any period of time.

With Storage Forecaster you can:

Run backup simulations of your current data backup systems in order to see how much storage you'll consume either on disk or with tape.
You can alter the simulated backup jobs in order to see the financial costs and storage resource impacts without ever affecting your production backup environment.
Generate comprehensive reports providing quantitative analysis, graphical pattern analysis and financial impact.
Compare and contrast the costs of backing up and storing data on disk and on tape.
See the impact of a legal-hold on your backup environment and the costs associated with eDiscovery.

The only way to get a handle on the true costs, and more importantly, the savings opportunities for your business is to use Storage Forecaster.

Article

A Cost Analysis of Media Consumption using System Dynamics Modeling in a Data Storage Backup Environment

Download a case study and see for yourself how the Storage Forecaster can save your organization time and money and stream line your backup environment today.