ARKIVIO Case Study :: Brokerage Group Migrates 60% of Primary Data to On-Line Archive - SAVES $1.7 MILLION

Company Background

With 200 offices on three continents, JKL Brokerage Group serves more than three million customers and is custodian for about $124 billion in customer assets. JKL Brokerage Group offers securities and bond trading, mutual funds, and other investment and retirement products, as well as research, news, and investment screening tools via the Internet, wireless devices, and phone. Reducing staff levels and closing offices this year were not enough to overcome the weakness in financial markets and lower trading volumes in 2002. The company is hoping to counter earnings pressure by expanding its financial planning business and improving operating efficiencies.

IT Environment

JKL Brokerage Group has a very heterogeneous IT environment with both Unix and Windows platforms, as well as a mature storage network and a large supply of automated tape libraries for long-term data archiving. In total, the company has 36 terabytes of on-line storage capacity spread across a large direct-attached server farm with over a hundred Windows/Unix file servers and SAN/NAS devices.

The Problem

JKL Brokerage Group realizes that end user demand, internet based services, and the need to deliver more and better services to their clients is dramatically increasing the amount of data being stored and the amount that needs to be kept online. The IT administrators at JKL know that up to 70% of their online data isn’t accessed after the first month of creation; however, they also know they can’t predict which 20% of the total amount of data end users will need to access. Additionally, due to government regulations such as SEC Rule 17a-4 and the Sarbanes-Oxley act, JKL Brokerage Group is required to retain much of their data for up to seven years. For instance, they must save check books, bank statements, cancelled checks and cash reconciliations, portfolio analysis, bills receivable, copies of all communications, contracts, records, etc. For these reasons, Data Retention Management solutions are being given a high priority at JKL Brokerage Group.

In order to provide timely customer service, JKL Brokerage Group has a policy to keep its data on-line on primary storage for up to two years, and then data is archived to off-line media such as optical or tape for long-term data retention. However, it is become very costly to keep two years worth of data on primary storage devices, such as their file servers. Attempts to manually migrate data using custom scripts have proven to be inefficient and disruptive to end user productivity.

ARKIVIO Solution

JKL Brokerage Group is looking for a way to intelligently automate archiving of their low-value data to less expensive on-line storage such as their NAS appliances in order to reduce their overall cost per terabyte, yet still maintain adequate customer service response times and comply with federal regulations. Arkivio, Inc. can solve JKL Brokerage Group's business/IT problems in several ways.

First, the ARKIVIO® auto-stor software is loaded onto a standard Windows 2000 server. Then without requiring any agents, the Arkivio solution discovers all the Unix/Windows storage and data resources across multiple primary storage devices. The IT administrators run reports to determine total available and utilized capacity. Even more important, they gain a deeper understanding of their data and its value to the brokerage group. For instance, they identify less valuable data, such as pricing documents not accessed within the last 180 days. The administrators organize and classify their data into logical groups using attributes such as file type, extension, age, size, last modified/accessed, owners, and priority. They create storage groups as well that logically combine volumes based on common attributes such as storage type, cost per megabyte, capacity, and make/model. Even though these files and volumes are spread across many different storage devices on the network, the IT administrators are able to globally manage all their information resources, which greatly simplifies storage administration.

JKL Brokerage Group then deploys the ARKIVIO® auto-stor Policy Automation Engine (PAE) and push install Remote Server Assistants for the servers that they want to manage. The ARKIVIO PAE incorporates the Global File and Storage Groups created by the IT administrators and automatically and transparently migrates the low and medium value data on the primary storage devices to the low-cost NAS storage volumes. This saves the administrators from having to examine each file, its owner, project, creation date and last access time. Also, the administrators do not have to manually move the files, inform the end user that the files are in a new location, and they will not have to go to end users' client systems to change file access paths. From this point forward ARKIVIO® auto-stor intelligently and adaptively directs data to the appropriate storage device according to the administrator-defined policies.

The Result

ARKIVIO® auto-stor enables JKL Brokerage Group to use advanced policy automation to migrate low-value data from primary storage to low-cost NAS, rather than off-line tape. This reduces the time period data remains on primary storage from two years to six months. Over time, JKL Brokerage Group is able to migrate over 60 percent or 21 terabytes of their legacy data off primary storage prolonging the useful life of their primary storage devices and saving the company $1.7 million by deferring future hardware purchases.