Topics & Trends: Improve Data Center Operational Efficiency

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” This phrase can be applied in many situations, including the categorization of PKWARE’s products. For instance, many IT professionals think of PKZIP® solely as a compression product and SecureZIP® only as a data security product.

While those generalizations could be considered correct, the reality is many customers use PKZIP and SecureZIP as data management solutions to improve operational efficiency in their data centers. A few simple case studies will help illustrate how operational efficiency has been achieved with our customers.

International Bank: Dependable File Transfer to Meet Service Level Agreements A leading international bank in the United Kingdom was bumping up against very tight processing windows, involving the transfer of a 1GB file to the United States over a telecommunications line equivalent to a T1 (approximately 1.5 Mb/per second). When successful, the transfer would take approximately 1.5 hours to complete, but because the transfer time was so long, many times it would fail. This caused the bank to miss very costly service level agreements (SLA). To ensure the file transfer and avoid SLA penalties, it was faced with increasing the bandwidth of the line, which would then increase their telecommunications costs.



Instead, the bank investigated the use of PKZIP to compress the file prior to transmission and decompress the file once it arrived in the United States. Much to their surprise, the file was highly compressible and they were able to achieve a compression ratio of 95%. When they transmitted the ZIP archive, the total transmission time was reduced to 5 minutes. Because the file transmission time was significantly less than the original 1.5 hours, the transmission was less susceptible to failure. And, in any instance where the transfer would fail, they had significantly more time to restart the process. Since installing PKZIP into their process, they have not missed a file delivery service level commitment.

Data center operational efficiencies are not exclusive to optimizing computing resources. In many instances, data center efficiency results in time-savings for technical resources.

Logistics Company: Compression Significantly Reduces File Transfer, Saving Time and Money A large logistics company transmitted thousands of files a day as separate processes. The Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) for a file transfer job was approximately 1 job failure out of every 500 successful file transfers. This was due to simple connection failure, insufficient temporary space, node failure, and the like. For this particular system, the customer was performing around 2,000 file transfers a day, which equates to approximately four failures a day.

One benefit of a ZIP archive is that it is not limited to just a single file – it can contain many files in a single archive. This company realized that they could significantly reduce the number of file transfer jobs by aggregating hundreds of files into a single archive.



By doing so, they not only reduced the amount of data they needed to transfer, due to the compression, but they also decreased the number of files transferred in a day from 2,000 to only 200. This reduced their MTBF from four failures a day to only one failure every 2.5 days. Given that it would take, on average, one man-hour to remediate a failure, this resulted in a time savings of $60,000 a year.

Read PKWARE’s Customer Success Stories for more examples of PKZIP and SecureZIP delivering greater operational efficiencies to data center processes with, in many cases, a substantial return on investment.