Balesio AG, provider of native format optimisation solutions for unstructured data, has successfully helped a public sector institution significantly reduce the size and impact of its unstructured data. With balesio’s FILEminimizer Server software, Tavistock College, a specialist language College located in Devon, UK, has reduced the footprint of its Microsoft Office files stored on expensive primary storage by an impressive average of 75%.
Tavistock College is home to approximately 1,800 students aged between 11 to 18 and 220 staff, all of whom frequently use Microsoft Office and notably PowerPoint and Word to create, distribute and save learning material and presentations. The growing amount of unstructured files that students and teachers at Tavistock College create and store on the school’s file servers is immense and has become increasingly difficult to manage. As a result the school’s IT department was faced with increasing storage requirements on a tight public sector budget. Purchasing additional capacity to feed the increasing data volumes was not an option.
After careful consideration of a number of apparent options the college selected balesio’s Native Format Optimization (NFO) solution FILEminimizer Server to tackle the problem at source. The software’s capability to effectively reduce the size of unstructured data by 50 to 90% from one central installation was instrumental to the institution’s successful fight against file bloat and high unstructured data growth.
Umberto Bergonzini, the Network Manager responsible, confirms: “Like any educational establishment we were drowning in an endless sea of PowerPoint presentations and other unstructured data. We wanted a solution that addressed this storage problem head on and balesio’s FILEminimizer Server does exactly that.”
A reduction in the college’s primary storage requirements was achieved shortly after the deployment of the balesio software and for Bergonzini the gains have been substantial, “Thanks to balesio’s FILEminimizer Server we were able to reclaim on average 75% of our storage space which was previously wasted by bloated files. We improved our storage utilisation by a factor of four. That’s impressive by any count.”
Christoph Schmid, Chief Operating Officer at balesio, adds “We are seeing a growing number of public sector institutions benefit from our NFO technology because they are under significant pressure to meet increasing storage requirements caused especially by unstructured data growth with flat or limited budgets. IT administrators around the world now realise that there is an easy, quick and cost-effective way to make their storage work smarter and that is by applying content-aware optimization technology such as NFO to already compressed unstructured files with the result that such files take up 2-5x less storage space.”