IMARK Group: A Case-Study

About IMARK Group

IMARK Group, based in Bowie, Maryland, United States, is a member-owned marketing group made up of over 900 independently-owned electrical distributors throughout the United States. Founded in 1996, they serve the needs of electrical contractors, industrial and institutional MRO customers, electric utilities and other customer types throughout the country.

The Challenge

IMARK Group uses Amazon S3 for durable and secure backup storage of their databases and back-office servers. For the purposes of preserving older backups, IMARK Group is taking advantage of the "versioning" feature of Amazon S3 which preserves all versions of files, even if they were deleted.

Since Amazon S3's "versioning" feature preserves all versions of all files, IMARK Group was paying for the storage, even when the files had been deleted and were no longer needed.

To reduce the Amazon S3 costs, Kevin Davis, Director of Information Technology with IMARK Group, asked:

"I have been watching my S3 storage grow and grow. I finally figured out why its growing. There are a lot of files that are flagged as 'Delete Marker'. Do you have a task that I can use to clean up my S3 buckets and remove any file that is flagged as a 'Delete Marker'?"

Kevin was looking for a solution that met the following criteria:

  • Reliable: IMARK Group needed to delete the unnecessary files on a regular basis.
  • Cost-effective: The company needed a solution that was low cost so as not to lose the cost-savings of deleting the extra files.
  • Low Maintenance: They did not want to manage their own scripts or perform the tasks manually.

The Solution

A new action was created to meet IMARK Group's requirements called "Erase Deleted S3 Objects". Using Skeddly's new action, IMARK Group was able to initially delete over 1.9 TB of Amazon S3 storage.

"I love it. I ran it against all my buckets, and I have scheduled the task to run every Saturday. I had one bucket that was extremely large. It had over 700,000 keys. Once the cleanup completed it had only 60,000 keys. Now that it is cleaned up, I think the weekly cleanup will only take about 2 hours."

The Benefits

1.9 TB of Amazon S3 storage was costing IMARK Group a considerable amount each month. Since these files were not required anymore, paying for this storage was unnecessary. By erasing the deleted S3 files, IMARK Group was able to save this cost.

By running the action once, IMARK Group initially achieved a 37,600% return on investment (ROI).

By scheduling the action to run once each week, IMARK Group is deleting over 600 GB of unnecessary files each week, saving over 32% from their S3 costs. With a Skeddly cost of only $0.15, IMARK Group is achieving a continuous ROI of over 11,900%.

"This task will save me lots of time and money. I have been doing this manually once a month, when I can remember, but now this cleans up all the little files that I just never make time to clean up."

What's Next?

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