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File Server Analysis – Taking the Pain out of Company Mergers

Managing Data When it Comes to Mergers! Mark Mulcahy – Waterford Technologies When it comes to Mergers, Acquisitions, Expansion or even downsizing,

Managing Data When it Comes to Mergers!

Mark Mulcahy – Waterford Technologies

File Server Analysis

When it comes to Mergers, Acquisitions, Expansion or even downsizing, there are a lot of complications that are involved. Financial decisions, Business direction, HR, security risk etc.

What often gets over looked or undervalued is the complexity that is required to manage the transition to the new organisation of a company’s data.

What once was logically stored ( I’m being nice ) in a location/format that worked for the old separate entity may not be the same for the new organisation.

IT is usually given this problem to solve and here is where we come riding to the rescue to give IT the solutions to solve this problem.

See below how a recent customer of ours had these very issues and how FlieArchiver was able to help.

File Server Analysis Helping to Understand Company’s Data

We have a long standing customer using our Email Management suite of products who recently merged with another company.

They asked us to help understand the current data on both sets of companies servers, analyse this data and try and intelligently merge, move, delete the appropriate data to the new organisations repository in an efficient manner so that the new organisation could start with data that is stored in an appropriate way and in an appropriate location.

Basically they had the good sense to realise they had one shot of organising their data in an efficient manner and that was while they were merging this data. They knew if they moved all the data to the new organisation they would never get around to cleaning this up as life would get in the way.

 

How did we do this:

Well the best place to start is to have one interface that could ask all the right questions of your data;

  • What is it?
  • Who put it there?
  • When was it last used?
  • Why was it put here?

And then more importantly, have one interface that could answer the questions correctly;

Once we could ask the right questions and get the right answers we could plan the new infrastructure in the right way.

 

See the diagram below which gives a high level overview of what we achieved:

File Server Analysis

 Results:

  • Deleted about 20% of their entire data in 24 Hours
  • Implemented ILM and tiered the location of the remaining data to sit on T1 and T2 storage
  • Reduce backup of T1 by 60%
  • Reduce T1 disk requirement by 60%
  • Reduced cost of building the new environment
  • Extended the life of the new infrastructure
  • Reduce TOC of Merger

To see exactly what is on your servers and to estimate how much saving you could achieve download our free Storage Savings Estimator