Free Storage ROI Calculator Released By Acronis

People who watch the numbers in corporate offices will go for this: A data centre manager now can utilise a free online service to determine storage capital cost savings due to deduplication and have the dollars-saved information ready on demand if asked for it.

Storage management and disaster recovery provider Acronis on 15 July made available a new calculator that is designed to estimate the storage savings an organisation could obtain using deduplication to improve storage capacities.

The calculator asks users for three pieces of information: the number of servers and workstations being backed up, the data change rate, and the overall cost of storage hardware and software. Based on this information, users can obtain accurate reports on how much storage space would be saved through deduplication, the dollar savings, and the percentage of savings, Acronis Senior director of marketing Bob Thaler told eWEEK.

Acronis also has made available a second calculator, one that charts ROI for more general data centre budget items, such as staffing, power and cooling, and resources.

“IT managers, if they’re not looking specifically for ROI in storage hardware and software or dedupe, but they are looking for ROI for disaster recovery or for overall ROI for time, money, people and resources, they’re both available free on our Web site,” Thaler said.

“Secondly, if customers want to use it internally, or attach it to an email and send it to a colleague and say, ‘Take a look at this, it’s a good starting point for assessing how we can save money,’ we can zip it up [in a Zip file] and make it a standalone module they can run on their own desktops,” Thaler said.

For example, a customer with 10 servers and 2TB of data that changes 5 percent per day and is kept for four weeks, will save about $20,000 (£12,000) in storage costs annually, Thaler said.

Acronis’ latest product, Backup & Recovery 10, was released 9 July.