Elastic Announces Searchable Snapshots to Reduce Data Storage Costs Without Compromising Performance

Searchable snapshots provide a tiered approach to searching across data that is saved in different classes of storage, addressing concerns including operational complexity, reduced system resiliency, and query limits. Elastic customers will be able to minimize costs with low-cost object stores such as Amazon S3, Azure Storage, and Google Cloud Storage. Initially, Elastic is supporting a new lower-cost cold tier of storage, which offloads redundant copies of data to the object stores to drive savings.

With searchable snapshots and the launch of a new cold storage tier, customers will benefit from:

• Lower storage costs - Data can be moved from more expensive, high-performance storage to far lower-cost data tiers while still remaining searchable, which frees up more performant storage for higher-value data.
• Streamlined operations - Formalized data tier definitions with built-in data transition rules and integrated index lifecycle management make it easier for customers to get up and running with their data storage policies and manage the full lifecycle of their data automatically.

In a future release, Elastic customers will be able to leverage a frozen tier of storage, where all data can be kept in low-cost object stores. This will unlock the opportunity to drive insights from virtually unlimited lookbacks, with low cost data retention on years of data. Elastic users will be able to ingest new types of data that they previously may not have considered, driving new innovative projects and use cases.

For more information read the Elastic blog about the launch of searchable snapshots.

Supporting Quotes:

• "Searchable S3 snapshots are going to be a game changer as we use our IT and data collection expertise to address the most urgent human security issues faced by the world’s vulnerable populations," said Madison Bahmer, CTO, IST Research. "We've typically only kept data in high performance storage for 6 to 12 months at a time; this functionality allows us to search across a much longer period, enabling us to better understand hard-to-reach communities and provide insights about effective communication strategies with community members."
• "As data expands exponentially over time, the cost of storing that data grows to the point where customers are forced to choose between deleting their data or managing increased costs," said Steve Kearns, vice president, product management, Elastic. "Searchable snapshots give our customers complete control over optimizing for cost, performance, and depth of data to gain deeper insights, enhance revenue, and drive innovation."