University of Hull Cracks Research Storage Budgets With Predictable Pricing
See how England’s University of Hull cost-effectively budgets for and stores large research datasets long-term with reliable Wasabi cloud pricing.
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Because Wasabi does not charge for egress or API calls, I don’t have to worry about accounting for them. Wasabi makes it so much simpler to tell researchers how much 10 TB of cloud will cost from their budget.
Craig Stephenson, Platform Services Manager, The University of Hull
Overview
Storing massive research data about some of the world’s biggest problems— cancer, modern day slavery, and flooding in at-risk communities—presents expensive IT challenges for England’s University of Hull, founded in 1927.
Researchers at the University often create large datasets—as much as 150 TB on one project—that often need to be kept indefinitely. And with research data growing year over year, expanding storage on-prem proved to be unmanageable and unsustainable.
Finding the right cloud solution was critical, but previous cloud suppliers Hull tried turned out to be too expensive with their yearly cost increases and other vendors with unpredictable egress and application programming interface (API) request fees. Then, they discovered Wasabi, which delivered the cloud control they were looking for:
Predictable pricing
Accurate budgeting
Long-term data accessibility for free
INDUSTRY:
Higher Education
USE CASE:
Active archive
Challenges
Budgeting for long-term research storage
Understanding where their money was going was essential for keeping an already tight IT budget on track. Even though long-term data retention was getting harder to justify, researchers still required data preserving. The retention period can also be mandated by an industry partner, sponsored or external funding source.
To store it or not to store it? That is the question.
The University had to accommodate many research storage patterns with their new solution. Some researchers save data during the lifespan of the project and no further. Some keep data for one year or longer for compliance, and some researchers simply do not like to delete data—they want to keep it just in case they can use it on another project.
Solutions
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Fixed rates without hidden fees make accurate forecasting easier
Wasabi’s flat-rate cost structure and free egress provide clear visibility into the costs associated with storing large datasets. The university initially purchased 300 TBs of storage from Wasabi for a fixed price over three years. They have used 70% of it so far—which is what they expected—and can easily scale when more is needed.
Wasabi’s cost transparency allows Hull IT to better forecast budgets and provide exact pricing to internal departments and researchers planning projects. Researchers can now store vast amounts of unstructured data longer, accessing it only when needed, and without the concern of hidden fees putting them over budget.
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Results
Hull continues scaling and exploring Wasabi
While Hull is currently using Wasabi as a long-term storage repository—allowing only a few researchers to upload data to it—they are now looking at adding other Wasabi solutions to keep up with IT advancements. For example, they are considering Wasabi integration into their backup and recovery strategy and housing CCTV footage long-term with Wasabi Surveillance Cloud. But for now, Hull can keep on scaling and perfecting IT budgets with Wasabi’s predictable cloud storage value, which is up to 80% less than the major hyperscalers and never charges egress or API request fees.