Cloud Storage Cost Reduction (Box.com to On-Premise Storage)

The Story

A customer came to us to look over their bills. The first thing we checked was their cloud storage.

No surprise—we noticed their monthly cost at Box.com was around $5,400 per month and growing as their user count increased.

It wasn’t even that much storage, only about 3TB, but spread across many users. Because Box.com charges per user rather than by storage amount, it was costing a fortune.

After talking with the customer, we learned they had grown tired of the loss of control with some of their cloud services. Prices kept rising, and certain cloud platforms were simply not efficient from a cost perspective. They wanted to explore options for moving core storage back in-house, since they already had a decent IT room, power, and other infrastructure they were paying for.

Because they were already on VMware, Dataforge deployed a fully managed VSAN system with about 100TB of fully redundant storage. On top of that, we added an offsite backup to our datacenter and quarterly tape archival for offline ransomware protection. Even with all of this, the costs came to only about $1,800 per month—fully managed and supported.

In addition, the customer can now spin up VMs whenever they want, with no extra charges. The storage is scalable and completely redundant within the cluster.

The system is fully accessible remotely, just like a cloud solution. From the end-user point of view, very little changed.

Summary

• A customer was paying $5,400/month at Box.com for just 3TB of data, due to user count and Box’s per-user pricing model.
• Dataforge replaced it with a 100TB VMware VSAN system, including offsite backup and quarterly tape archival, for $1,800/month.
• The new system is scalable, redundant, and remotely accessible, with little change for end users.

If your interested in these type of solutions or would like us to look over your current services there might be significant savings immediately and in the long run as your business grow.