Zetta Scalabytes Blog

In acquiring and selecting a backup solution, cost is, of course, an important concern. Modern online backup and cloud backup solutions offer some interesting options when you consider all the costs of implementing full offsite data protection with reasonable recovery times. Cloud backup costs can actually be lower than more traditional options.
 
Different approaches to backup — cloud, on-site, and tape/removable media — can be significantly different, cost-wise. Solutions within each approach may have price differences as well. And, of course, the different approaches have different benefit and use case profiles. For example, an on-site appliance or off-site tape may not meet your requirements for Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery. So you have to be careful to not just compare based on pricing.
 

The Challenges and Concerns of Tape

Tape solutions have a lot of initial and recurring expenses, notably:
 

• Tape-only solutions require local tape drives and, depending on how many tapes a backup requires, an automated multi-tape system. As your data volume grows, and tape technology evolves, you are likely to need to replace your tape hardware periodically to provide faster speeds and higher capacities.

 

• You need a continually-refreshed library of tapes, since tapes do wear out, and you’re likely to need more tapes as well.

 

• Tape backups require on-site IT to mount or swap tapes, and prepare them for shipment off-site. Any tapes being kept on site need to be stored in an environmentally stable, secure container.

 

• You need an offsite tape storage service, media, and possibly also tape automation equipment. Plus you need a trusted courier service to pick up and deliver tapes. Third-parties can provide all this — but it still costs money.

 

• Restoring from tape takes time — which represents downtime and possible loss of business, even if there’s no additional itemized costs — to request tapes, have them be found and couriered back to your site, and perform the restore. If multiple tapes are needed, this will take, and possibly cost, even more.

 

• Tapes that are removed from use must be recycled or disposed of responsibly, not just in terms of environmental concerns, but also ensuring that data has been “scrubbed” so it cannot be retrieved by unauthorized parties.

Disk, Disk-to-Disk, Disk-to-Tape

Like tape, disk-based backups require investments in premises gear, space, power (and cooling).
 
If you want disk backups to go off-site, they, like tape, require having a library of removable disks or a set of transportable disk devices, plus provisioning secure transport and storage; or replication software plus networking gear, plus storage systems or a managed storage provider at the other end.
 
If you want these offsite disk backups to provide disaster recovery, you’ll need application software, plus hardware. Fortunately, server virtualization has made this simpler and less expensive than in the past, where you had to maintain physical duplicates of your main hardware environments.
 

Costs of Non-Cloud Solutions in General

All premises backup — like tape, disk or combination — have a power, cooling and space footprint, along with software licensing, service agreements. Plus the need for IT time to plan, purchase and deploy solutions; monitor ongoing performance and maintenance; track capacity requirements; and buy additional gear and media as needed.
 
Similarly, off-site solutions require data centers — owned, or service facilities — to house backups. These, in turn, have to provide physical and cyber security; be staffed to respond to restore queries; and be administered.
 
A blended disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) solution can provide local recoveries faster than a tape-only one, but the cost premium is substantial, close to doing both tape-only and disk-to-disk.
 

Cloud Backups Offer Direct, Indirect Cost Advantages

Cloud backup can avoid many-to-most of the direct and indirect costs of traditional premises and off-site tape/disk-based backups.
 
Zetta’s online backup service, for example, is all-inclusive with charges only for storage footprint.
 

• There are no appliances to buy, administer and maintain; no media to wrangle; no software fees; no physical space, power or cooling footprint.

 

• Zetta does not charge for bandwidth (you will need Internet connectivity to your site — but you need that anyway, these days), nor for IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second).

 

• Your company does not have to pay for a secondary data center to house the remote data.

 

• No “pre-buying” of capacity. As your backup footprint scales, so does your Zetta service — automatically, not requiring your IT staff to monitor and request more capacity.

 

• No costs for protracted downtime. With Zetta, data recovery is instantaneous. Simply mount the data that’s at Zetta and begin running again. No waiting for tapes or disk shipments or even copying the data back.

 
Not all cloud backup solutions cost the same — or offer the same capabilities. Once you understand how cloud solutions differ in price and methodology from traditional premises and off-site backup solutions, the next steps will be to understand the possible start-up, ongoing and per-incident charges for cloud backup — and how to compare the TCO of cloud backup against the ROI — the cost versus the value, compared with the more limited benefits of traditional backups.
 
For more information on cloud backup and to explore some of the other decision criteria, visit the Zetta Cloud Backup decision center.
 

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2012 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Data Backup, Data Protection, Disaster Recovery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.