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Information Governance Saves Millions
for national defense contractor
Shortly after taking over as Director of Data Center Storage at a defense contractor, Mark
Tango realized he had a problem – a really big problem.
To be exact, 5.5 petabytes worth of problems. 5.5 petabytes of unstructured (e.g.,
documents, presentations, spreadsheets) and structured (e.g., databases) information. A
petabyte can store the equivalent of 500 billion pages of standard printed text. It would
take about 11,000 typical laptop computers to store all that information. That’s a whole lot
of information.
But to make matters worse, Mark quickly realized that, like most organizations the size of
BAE Systems, the company had a lot of information that was providing little or no value to
the organization, like:
• decades-old, outdated information;
• information that had no business being in the data center (like personal music
MP3s); and
• PST files which, after email archiving was deployed, should not exist
• information that duplicated what they were already paying good money to store
and manage elsewhere
With the help of Active Navigation Inc., Tango set out to reduce the organizations
enterprise data footprint from 5.5 PB to 3.0 PB. Active Navigation provides file analysis
software for the discovery and ongoing control of unstructured information.
Over the course of one year, the team was able to analyze 2.0 PB of data across three data
centers, ultimately eliminating 881 TB of both Tier 1 and Tier 2 storage. These efforts
helped the company shave nearly $2 million per year off its storage costs.
Additionally, the teams were able to decommission approximately 75 storage units from
various vendors; reducing additional support costs and avoiding the risks associated with
aging storage devices. The team also saved money because the company didn’t have to buy
additional storage devices.
The cost of Tier 1 storage is likely lower than the rest of the industry,” Tango said. “We are
at fifty-three cents a gigabyte for Tier 1 storage, which is certainly very cheap for the
industry. But our internal charge has a number of pieces associated with it and our project
is helping us keep that cost low.”
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The project was so successful that this exact method is featured in the Gartner report,
“Save Millions in Storage Costs with These Effective Data Management Best Practices.”
How Did Tango and His Team Do It?
Initially, Tango asked his team a key question: “So guys, what is your formula for
forecasting storage growth?”
He was astounded by the answer: “We just buy 40 percent more [storage] every year.”
Tango’s response: “Oh, boy.”
So Tango got to work. An initial analysis confirmed that the company had a data sprawl
problem. It was not the first time that company had recognized the problem, but like most
big companies, it often takes more than one attempt to solve complex problems.
Tango’s next step was to contact Peter Baumann, CEO, and Steve Matthews, VP Business
Development at Active Navigation who had worked with in a previous project, and started
“brand new.”
Early on, the team ran into what Tango called “the fear factor.” People who had worked at
here for years didn’t want to rock the boat. They didn’t want to delete anything for fear of
losing their jobs.
“So it was my job to then become not only the project leader, but also the project sponsor,
the project educator, the project mentor, and then the project salesperson to get buy-in
from upper management,” Tango said.
A key tool was the detailed reports the team produced bringing visibility into was being
stored, what could still be reduced, what had been reduced and the cost savings that had
been achieved. Tango said the company was able to use the reports generated by the
software to get business leaders to act on data reduction by showing them how much
money they could save.
Once the execs understood that the game changed, he said.
“Since that time, we have had buy-in all the way up to the C-level,” Tango said. “That
basically gives us the ability to move forward with little to no obstructions.”
After everyone was on board, the team worked with Records Management to determine
what was and what wasn’t a record.
“At first, their definition was ‘everything is a record,’” he said. “But once we got legal
involved, we helped them understand that keeping useless data around has real risks. If we
don’t have a business or legal need to keep it, then it should go.’”
The team crawled 1.5 PB of data, first looking for easy opportunities for data reduction by
scanning for redundant, outdated and trivial (ROT) data. The initial scan identified some
easy targets, including, for example, 4,000 copies of the same document about the
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company’s 2007 annual picnic. BAE Systems also scanned user home directories for log
files, pictures and disallowed files types like digital music files, PSTs, hard drive clones,
and disk images.
To make the job easier, the company decided not to analyze all 5.5 PB at once but instead
began by analyzing strategic targets that together added up to 2.0 PB – a much more
manageable workload for the data management team.
Changing the Internal Business Model for Storage
“Now this is a very interesting piece of the story – up until recently we were charging for
storage based only on what you used,” Tango said. “We worked very hard to show a
business case to the company that we should be charging for what was allocated. If a
database admin needed two terabytes of volume disk space, and we’re only charging them
for the 600 gigs they were using, nobody else can use the other 1.4 terabytes because it is
locked in at the volume allocation size and cannot be reduced.”
So a few months ahead of time, the team met with all of the business technology officers
and announced a new chargeback model was to be introduced that would require business
areas to start paying for the storage they were allocated, not just the storage they actually
used.
“Well, that sent the droves of people running to us, which was lovely, because it gave us
the opportunity to right-size the storage,” Tango said. “And that right-sizing activity,
which lasted a week or two for each vertical, allowed us to show cost avoidance of around
two million dollars in three weeks.”
The software was also able to show the company databases that hadn’t been written to in
three years or more – databases that the company was able to eliminate, Tango said. After
the teams identified the worthless data, the Active Navigation tool made cleaning it up
easy and auditable, Tango said.
“We simply highlight those areas, and we either delete them, or in certain cases where we
have to hold it for contractual obligations, we move the data to a cold storage area, which
we built at a cost of zero,” he said. “So contractual data that has to be held doesn’t need to
sit on tier-one or tier-two data storage – it gets to sit on our free cold storage array built
from decommissioned arrays.”
Next Steps
But the team isn’t finished yet – there’s a lot more work to do, Tango said.
“We’re doing it in phases. The first phase was to get everybody warmed up, hit the low-
hanging fruit. What’s easy? What’s a quick win?” he said. “That got everybody excited. So
when we hit with Active Navigation, the first ROT – people felt good because, ‘hey, we just
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saved ten grand, twenty grand, thirty grand.’ We used that excitement to continue to push
forward.”
During the second phase, the team will use the tool to scan at the content level for
sensitive data, including data subject to export control, data containing personally
identifiable information and so on.
The company also has another goal this year – to decommission another 30 storage units,
Tango said.
Now that the first phase of the project has been completed, Tango said the company has
established the Data Governance Board – a group of data compliance managers who work
within the different verticals.
“They are assisting us in the compliance and governance of the different types of data,
such as determining retention periods, Tango said. “They are also working with the legal
department to determine what can be defensibly deleted.”
Tango’s advice to other companies looking to reduce their data
footprints
You can do it.
“Start off with small wins. Don’t try to be a hero. Go in, evaluate with whatever product
that you chose to interrogate your data – but start slow and do it in chunks, sector by
sector, or department by department,” he said. “That gives you the time to work with each
department, clean the data, show the value, show the cost savings. As you keep going, you
build up more steam. The more steam you build, the greater the savings.”
Additionally, Tango reiterated the need to get C-level buy-in by showing the executives
how much storing worthless data is costing the company.
Finally, Tango said every IG professional needs to keep a scorecard to document the
amount of money saved in storage clean up or cost avoidance to show to upper
management at regular intervals.
The bottom line: “To keep storage costs under control, storage managers must effectively
manage – and even delete – current data,” according to Gartner. “They must also
implement a data management policy to keep future storage growth and related costs at
bay.”
