Project Name
ClickHouse and MinIO Hot-Cold Tiering Cut Storage Costs for a Multinational Telecom Operator
A multinational telecommunications and financial services group operating across multiple regions ingests massive volumes of structured and unstructured data daily, including call detail records, network logs, PDFs, and identity documentation. Under GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS mandates, the group faced a structural tension between the speed required for real-time analysis and the cost economics of retaining years of compliance-grade data on high-performance infrastructure. The existing ClickHouse deployment was optimised for hot workloads but lacked the storage capacity and cost model to sustain historical data at scale. Applying its AI-First approach, Ksolves redesigned the architecture around a reverse-tiered model: ClickHouse ingests everything and owns the hot tier, while MinIO automatically absorbs aged records via TTL policies, leaving metadata and retrieval paths intact so no data is ever out of reach.
- ClickHouse Storage Constraints: The ClickHouse cluster was engineered for real-time ingestion and sub-second OLAP queries, but its local filesystem storage could not sustain the accumulating volume of historical data. The cluster was approaching capacity with no cost-effective path to expand indefinitely.
- Rising Infrastructure Costs: Retaining all data within ClickHouse's premium storage tier meant infrastructure costs scaled linearly with data volume. As ingestion rates grew with subscriber base expansion, the cost trajectory was unsustainable without a tiered offload strategy.
- Retrieval Flexibility Across Tiers: Analysts and compliance teams needed the ability to query old records by metadata and retrieve raw files on demand. A binary hot-or-cold approach where offloaded data became unreachable was not operationally acceptable.
- Regulatory Compliance Across Multiple Jurisdictions: Retention policies under GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS required long-term archival with provable auditability. The existing architecture had no governed mechanism to enforce retention, demonstrate data lineage, or produce audit trails across the full data lifecycle.
- No Automated Lifecycle Management: There was no automated system to move data between tiers, update storage references, or enforce deletion and archival behaviours. Everything relied on manual processes or bespoke scripts, creating operational fragility and compliance risk.
- No Observability Into Archival Health: Once data left the hot layer, there was no monitoring of whether archived objects were healthy, whether TTL jobs had run successfully, or whether query performance was degrading. Failures surfaced only when analysts reported missing data.
Ksolves redesigned the architecture around a reverse-tiered model. ClickHouse is the universal ingestion point and hot-query layer. MinIO is the governed cold-storage tier for all data beyond the TTL threshold. The governing principle: every record is queryable via ClickHouse metadata regardless of tier, and the storage cost profile scales with data age, not total volume.
- ClickHouse Hot Tier With TTL Policies: All data ingested and indexed immediately on arrival. TTL expressions automatically trigger movement to MinIO once records exceed the 60-day threshold, keeping the local filesystem focused on high-demand recent data only.
- MinIO Cold Tier With S3-Compatible Storage: Distributed S3-compatible object store providing cost-effective archival for aged records. Retention periods aligned to GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS. Each object is accessible via its S3 path stored as a metadata reference in ClickHouse.
- Seamless Retrieval via Metadata References: Every record remains queryable through ClickHouse metadata after cold-tier offload. Analysts retrieve the S3 path on demand. The hot/cold boundary is transparent to end users.
- Lifecycle Automation and Retention Enforcement: Scheduled background jobs automate file migration on TTL expiry, update S3 path references in real time, and enforce per-policy archival behaviours. Manual intervention removed entirely.
- End-to-End Monitoring and Validation: TTL job execution status, MinIO object health, and ClickHouse query performance metrics monitored across the full workflow from ingestion through archival and retrieval.
Technology Stack
| Category | Technology |
|---|---|
| Hot Storage | ClickHouse |
| Cold Storage | MinIO |
| Compliance Framework | GDPR · HIPAA · PCI-DSS controls |
- Storage Costs Significantly Reduced: Historical data beyond 60 days offloaded to MinIO automatically. High-performance storage footprint reduced to the active query window. Costs now scale with recent data volume, not total retention.
- ClickHouse Query Performance Preserved: The TTL architecture keeps the local filesystem lean. Sub-second query performance maintained on the records analysts access most frequently.
- 100% of Compliance Mandates Met: Every data movement is policy-driven and logged. Retention enforced automatically per regulatory mandate. Full data lineage auditable on demand across GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.
- Zero Manual Lifecycle Intervention: Automated TTL rules and background jobs execute every lifecycle transition without human input from expiry detection through MinIO migration and reference updates.
- Historical Data Fully Retrievable: S3 path references in ClickHouse allow any archived record to be located and retrieved on demand. The hot-cold boundary is invisible to analysts and compliance teams.
“Our data used to pile up with no way to keep costs under control and still meet retention requirements. Now the system handles all of that automatically, and we can query anything, recent or archived, without thinking about where it lives.”
-Head of Data Infrastructure.
A multinational telecom and financial services operator with an unsustainable storage cost trajectory, no automated lifecycle management, and multi-jurisdictional compliance obligations unmet by its existing architecture was transformed through Ksolves’ big data services. A reverse-tiered ClickHouse and MinIO architecture now automates the full data lifecycle. Recent data stays fast and local. Historical data moves to cost-effective cold storage automatically. Every record remains queryable via metadata regardless of tier. Compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS is enforced as policy, not a manual process. The architecture extends to additional data sources, regions, and compliance frameworks without redesigning the storage layer.
Storing Everything at Full Price Because You Have No Archival Layer?
