The data center hardware industry’s new trend is marketing appliances which combine computing, software and storage in a single box to replace discrete components.
One of the areas where appliances get discussed a lot is backup. These are known as Purpose Built Backup Appliances or PBBA solutions. According to IDC estimates $2.8 billion worth of PBBAs shipped in 2011 with 771,488 TB of capacity for an average cost of $3,629 per TB in hardware alone.
On-premise appliance-based backup solutions have some advantages for large enterprises, but for SMEs they can’t beat online backup for at least 6 reasons:
1. Upfront Appliance Costs
With an appliance, you still need to purchase the hardware and software, plus pay for any ongoing support, licensing or maintenance contracts.
You either oversize the appliance to accommodate planned growth or have to add more appliances as storage capacity increases. With online backup-as-a-service, on the other hand, all you do is pay for current capacity needed.
2. Appliances Need Upgrades and Refreshes
With an appliance, you still need to spend time keeping up to date on the latest changes in server and backup technology and you have to routinely replace your hardware as it ages or to meet new needs.
With online backup, the vendor has that responsibility.
3. Buying Multiple Appliances
It’s risky to rely on a single backup instance. Additional appliances are needed at multiple locations for disaster recovery and high availability.
With backup-as-a-service, the vendor maintains the additional copies so that if a device, a rack or an entire data center goes down, your data is still continuously available. For example, Zetta uses a unique RAIN-6 architecture to insure high availability for our customers.
4. Virtualized Backup
With PBBAs, your backup is still tied to a particular piece of hardware in a particular rack, in a particular room. With online backup, the backup is virtualized among multiple devices and data centers so there is never a single point of failure.
5. Completely Eliminating Tape
When using a PBBA, you still need to offload the data to tape for offsite archiving.
With Zetta, every backup is available for instant online restoration for a period of at least seven years and even longer if you require it.
6. Higher Burden on IT Team
An appliance simplifies backup, but still requires trained specialists to monitor and manage the backup and restoration processes.
With backup-as-a-service, staff can be freed up for other tasks.
These are the 6 best reasons for small and medium sized businesses to consider online backup for real enterprise-grade data protection that’s really affordable.
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