Dollar per gigabyte, it costs us more because we are storing more. However, if you look at it from a cost per gigabyte perspective, we have dropped our costs significantly.

The annual support and maintenance costs compared to our old solution for backups had about a two-thirds savings, so about a 60% annual savings on our support and maintenance contract. That savings funded additional expansion for what it was costing us for the support and maintenance contracts on old solution. We bought an additional node. It also saved us on not having to do forklift upgrades, or rip and replace upgrades. Rather than having to do those, we could purchase an additional node and add higher capacity drives, which is something that other backup vendors weren't certifying.

This gives us annual savings on the support and maintenance contract, but also savings on our time and efforts. We don't have to do a disruptive rip and replace, moving everything over. We can add a node, migrate the capacity, and elegantly decommission a node if we choose to do so. If it's no longer supported or if there's hardware issues, we can migrate the data and do it in a non-disruptive fashion.

We have had a 40 to 50 percent reduction in CAPEX on the acquisition of new hardware, which is probably conservative.

We didn't repurpose existing servers. While it was an option on the table, we had the money within our budget to buy new hardware because of 60 percent or more savings that we had because we didn't have to maintain the support and maintenance of our old systems.

We bought new hardware which provided better capacity and density. Then, this year we did the same thing because we've had several years of savings, so we bought new hardware. This is on the storage nodes. 

We did actually repurpose the controller. The controller didn't need to be physical. It could have been virtual. At the time, our virtual infrastructure was a little overextended. We had a physical system which was capable of hosting the controller side of things. So, we did repurpose hardware for the controller. However, for the storage systems, because capacity and density are such an important part of what we were doing going forward, we bought chassis geared more towards getting as much capacity in as small amount of space as possible.

The ROI is both monetary and in time. The only way it could get any cheaper would be if we stopped generating data.

That's really the bottom line to all this. Until people stop generating data that we have to store somewhere, we're going to be paying money. It's just how best to utilize the money we're spending on it. My opinion is that using SwiftStack is a good way.

We launched this product last year. It is too early for us to quantify ROI.

One area we have seen return on investment is our SLA, being able to offer a better SLA to our customers. That's definitely an advantage in the market.