Five databases, from 11.19 TB to 4.22 TB

When storage growth outruns the budget

This platform processes millions of transactions annually across an enterprise estate, and its data volumes were growing exponentially. Storage capacity was being consumed faster than it had been budgeted for, with five major databases exceeding 11 TB between them, and urgent space alerts were arriving on production systems and threatening business continuity. The obvious answer, buying more storage, was the one answer the budget did not allow.

Disaster recovery had a cost of its own. Restoring from VM disk is both time-consuming and expensive, and it sets a recovery time that has nothing to do with how quickly the business needs the data back.

Two more things were compounding it. Poorly optimized indexes were degrading the daily data refresh, and backups were being run manually, which turns every time-sensitive recovery into a bottleneck at the worst possible moment.

What changed

• Five critical databases reduced by 62%From 11.19 TB to 4.22 TB, which dramatically improved backup and refresh times as well as freeing the space.
• Free space more than doubledFrom 5.98 TB to 12.95 TB across the environment, deferring the infrastructure investment the growth curve had been pointing at.
• 3.7 TB secured at no costThrough optimization of the allocation the client already held, rather than through a purchase order.
• Disaster recovery off VM restoreDaily hot backups to Azure blob storage, which removes both the cost and the recovery time of the VM disk procedure it replaced.
• A nine-day response to a production alertTwo 2.4 TB databases compressed and shrunk in under nine days after a low disk space alert on a 32 TB drive, through normal change management.