Ontrack helps market-leading UK & European insurance company reduce archive costs by approximately 85%

Feb 15, 2020

The client

An enterprise backup and archive storage provider wanted to assist it’s third party client - a marketleading UK insurance company - reduce the costs of their legacy archive storage facilities whilst maintaining restoration capabilities.

The situation

The end client was seeking to reduce the costs of maintaining a restore capability for its legacy archived data, which cost approximately £3.5 million over seven years just to maintain a restore capability.

The client then asked their new archive storage provider to seek out a way to help bring this cost down whilst maintaining the ability to restore and extract data from the legacy tapes, as these were not compatible with the new archive storage provider’s systems and required the proprietary software. The archive storage provider contacted Ontrack with their dilemma; so that they could progress with the sale of the modern archive system with a solution for maintaining the accessibility of the legacy archive tapes.

The solution

Upon briefing of the situation, the Ontrack tape services engineers devised a cost effective plan which involved the cataloguing of 3,600 9940B archive tapes which were created by the legacy system.

The archive data would then remain on the old tapes, so, in the event of a restoration requirement, the end client would consult their new archive catalogue for the exact tapes that contain the files that they require and Ontrack would perform the ad hoc restore.

The resolution

Ontrack worked with the client during an 18 month period to complete a pilot project to prove the concept was technically viable and cost effective whilst meeting stringent legal and company policy requirements around data security and protection.

Upon the success of the pilot project, the full tape archive catalogue was delivered in nine weeks, in order to retire the legacy system prior to the software renewal deadline. In the end, the solution developed allowed the end client to retire their legacy system, saving over £3 million in data retention and archiving costs.