Balesio Cuts Primary Storage of UK Tavistock College

Balesio AG, provider of
native format optimisation solutions for unstructured data, has helped a public sector institution 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 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 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 reduce the size of unstructured data by 50 to 90% from one central
installation was instrumental to the institution’s 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, COO 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."