Reduce Infrastructure Costs and Enable Blind Spot Detection With Datavoss Insights

Many of the customers that I work with today are running ever-growing, complex storage, backup and compute platforms from several different OEMs. Data is exponentially increasing in size and lives in more places than ever. Whether that's public cloud, primary storage or data protection, customers are overwhelmed with data but are lacking actionable insight across their environment.

Often customers will look at assessment services to try and fill this gap. Many of these services and tools on the market require that software be installed into the customer's environment and produce hundreds of spreadsheets. Data processing and customer interviews can take months, and getting the results back can take even longer. Many times we find the customers are overwhelmed and never truly take action to solve their problem.

A partnership for collecting and analyzing data

In partnership with Datavoss, we now have answers to this industry-wide problem. What's impressive is how Datavoss reduces the time it takes to collect data from weeks to hours and gets results back to the customer in a matter of days, not months. Beyond accelerating time to value, they provide insights that customers can take action on to solve problems, mitigate risk, increase efficiency and reduce cost. 

There is a four-phase methodology used to deliver outcomes to our customers.

1. Discovery: Collection of needed information is agentless with no software required to be installed on-prem. This facilitates a quick and frictionless collection for the customer that requires minimal effort. 
2. Normalization: Data is normalized and indexed. 
3. Analytics: Multidimensional correlation algorithms are applied and automated insights produced based on the need of the customer. 
4. Insight: Data is presented to the customer visually in a fully immersive digital experience. 

As partners, WWT and Datavoss have jointly engaged a customer that runs a backup environment compromised of four different OEMs. The challenge this customer needed to solve for was to know how much risk exposure and if they were able to reduce storage costs.

Customer success story

With about an hour of customer time on task, data was collected from their backup servers, storage and VMware environment. In leveraging their multidimensional correlation of the backup catalog, secondary storage and VMware environment, we were able to illustrate to the customer that there was a large population of clients that weren't protected, empowering our customer to take immediate action to reduce risk. 

We also uncovered that the hundreds of terabytes of compressed database backups were being stored on deduplication backup platforms, specifically Dell EMC Data Domain. Sending pre-compressed data/databases to deduplication appliances quickly turns your backup storage into the most expensive resource in the data center, with deduplication ratios below 2:1 at best.   

The interactive insights showed how much each database server was consuming on the Data Domain system, enabling the customer to convert those compressed database backups over to DDboost writing to Data Domain. This ensures data is deduplicated and stored efficiently. The data showed that by moving just a single large database over to DDboost/Application Direct, they would free up over 180tb of useable capacity. The outcome produced from this insight drove to an actionable priority list of clients that the customer can convert over to DDboost to save significant useable capacity on their Data Domain system.

As the customer makes changes, we measure the impact over time and facilitate continuous cost reduction and risk reduction improvements.

WWT and Datavoss are actively engaging across several customers, and the experience and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Whether you want to know if a workload is better suited to run in the public cloud or if you'll need to expand on-premise solutions in six months, WWT is uniquely positioned to provide those insights. Dive deeper on Datavoss capabilities by reaching out to me or filling out our contact form.