CBRE’s 750 French-based employees create unstructured data in the form of PowerPoint, Word and Excel files daily, before storing them on the local NetApp NAS. Over time this practice led to costly primary storage being wasted by ‘bloated’ data. In addition such a large amount of data on the NAS put a heavy strain on the network bandwidth and the backup infrastructure.

The CBRE IT team realised that if it was to optimise its primary storage it needed to address the issue of unstructured data; to achieve this it selected balesio’s FILEminimizer Server for its proven ability to tackle exactly this issue. The team, led by Clément Ekstein, project manager at CBRE France, installed the software on a Windows Server 2008 R2 connected to two NetApp FAS2020 and FAS2050 NAS systems. The software’s ability to reduce the size of unstructured files by up to 90% without changing the original file format put Ekstein and his colleagues in a position to address unstructured data growth easily and effectively.

For Ekstein balesio’s FILEminimizer Server is a winning tool: “We are using balesio’s FILEminimizer Server to keep our unstructured data volume down. And we are very satisfied how the software gets the job done.”

The balesio software now runs periodically and optimises unstructured files older than two months in one of two ways: by optimising performance and/or capacity. When used for performance maximisation, CBRE can reclaim approximately 30-35% of its storage whereas the savings are as high as 50% when FILEminimizer Server operates in capacity-optimisation mode.

Christoph Schmid, Chief Operating Officer at balesio, comments: “Since installing FILEminimizer Server CBRE has cut the footprint of its unstructured data by 35% to over 50%; that means that it has got nearly half of its primary storage capacity back without having to make changes to its existing IT infrastructure or make any compromises such as vendor lock-in. Its network is now faster and backups take less time to complete. It is very satisfying when customers tell us quite how much they have been able to save in terms of capacity, time and budget using our software and these results are behind the increasing demand for our Native Format Optimization technology that we are witnessing in Europe and both North and South America.”
 

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Tags: BC/DR, Deduplication

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