CASE STUDY

Sumally Inc., located in Japan, specializes in delivery and storage services for personal and home items. Customers can store their belongings in secure containers at Sumally Inc. locations and monitor them and their containers through their smartphone or computer. Each item stored at Sumally Inc. is photographed for customers to view, access, and manage from home. The service helps to itemize belongings and simplify the management of your home, converting personal items to data you can monitor from your smartphone. 
 
There are many cameras installed in the work area and along the route of egress to ensure that staff work is performed correctly, efficiently, and to improve staff processes. Data is stored locally for six months and backed up to the cloud, which is stored semi-permanently.  

Cost-effectively maintaining indispensable video data with failures

Sumally Inc.’s business model leverages data to empower consumers. Therefore, Sumally Inc. needs to securely and cost-effectively store that data. Historically, Sumally Inc. used Amazon S3 for backup storage. Keisukei Nomura, Senior Software Engineer at Sumally Inc., became concerned with the rising costs associated with AWS S3 as the amount of data stored increased. The decreasing value of the yen, which directly affects the IT team’s purchasing power, compounded this problem. 

 
Nomura and team considered an archive storage tier, but this would have made data access more time-consuming and costly. Should video data need to be accessed, it must be checked immediately. Nomura and the team also noticed that mounting AWS to their NVR occasionally failed, resulting in manual remounts. The IT team needed easy-to-use, cost-effective storage with quick data retrieval.   

Simple storage architecture with Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage and Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager 

When assessing storage alternatives, Nomura and the IT team at Sumally Inc. looked into Wasabi. “With Wasabi, we found that large amounts of video data could be handled without problems,” said Nomura. “The most significant deciding factors were Wasabi’s total cost and its cooperation in conducting our proof of concept. Our free trial indicated we could lower our storage costs to a third of our previous spend. Storage functionality was equal to or better than what Amazon S3 provided.” 
 
When 1 TB of data had been transferred to Wasabi, Sumally Inc.’s transfer speed from their NVR to Wasabi started to drop. Repeated investigations were unable to determine the cause, but the company still had plenty of data to migrate. Mr. Nomura calculated that with a low transfer rate, it would take two to three months to complete migration, and all the while, Sumally Inc. would have to continue paying to use Amazon S3. Mr. Nomura decided to use Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager, Wasabi’s data migration service, which enabled him to finish the video data migration in three days. “Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager was well worth it compared to the hours we would otherwise spend investigating bottlenecks” said Mr. Nomura.  

Conclusion

Since their initial migration to Wasabi, Mr. Nomura and the IT team at Sumally Inc. have found data backups in Wasabi to work smoothly and as a result of installation, storage costs have decreased to one-third of their previous costs. Since mounting no longer fails, Mr. Nomura no longer needs to work on correcting backup operations that have gone awry and can concentrate on his core business of IoT engineering. In the following words, Mr. Nomura discussed what the future will hold for the company.  

“The mission of Sumally Inc. is to update “possessions.” To shine a light on that mission, its objective is data, and storage can be seen as warehousing data. In the future, we should create business projects involving Wasabi as a partner.” Mr. Nomura thinks that if your goal is to control storage singlehandedly, Wasabi is the right fit.