Snap Out of Complacency and Look Toward Tomorrow’s Backup

Talk to any of your IT peers and a top strategic priority they constantly hear reverberating through their organization is “simplify technology.” It’s being driven from the top down, as evidenced by IDC’s recent State of the CIO survey, which indicated business leaders want the “CIO to simplify technology”.

So, what does this have to do with backup? Backup is one of the unsung heroes of IT. It isn’t flashy, but it’s essential. And it is definitely not simple, especially when it comes to appliance sizing to meet data growth demands.   This frustrating and costly pain point is what we call yesterday’s backup. This current method is complex and typically follows this flow:

This puts a fair amount of risk on correctly sizing the appliance, so it fits your needs today and tomorrow, making these use cases all too familiar:

1. Using the 2X-sizing paradigm, you estimate your data storage needs at 5TB, so you buy a 10 TB purpose-built appliance. Fast-forward six months, and due to data growth, you’ve filled it. So you’re either going to upgrade to a bigger appliance, buy a new one, or remove data. And this cycle will continue to repeat.
2. The opposite is also true. You buy the “10TB purpose-built appliance” and it takes two years to fill because your data growth isn’t as fast as originally envisioned. You overbought and paid a large upfront cost that sits underutilized for months.

Can your business afford these sizing mistakes? If you’re like most, the answer is no.

Enter Tomorrow’s Backup

Tomorrow’s backup converges these four technologies into one appliance:

• WAN accelerators: Great for network optimization and data payload reduction–both of which accelerate backup and RTO.
• Cloud storage gateways: These are hybrid appliances that automatically stream data to the cloud based on your data retention rules. Think of these as on-ramps to the cloud.
• Integrated purpose-built appliances: These on-premise appliances deliver fast backup and recovery, and include software.
• Direct-to-cloud backup: Easy to deploy, manage and scale. Leveraging the infinite capacity of the cloud, perfect for long-term storage, and great at protecting fragmented data pools (physical, virtual and end point).

This convergence enables a new approach to backup that allows IT to do the following:

• Simplify the backup and recovery process.
• Accelerate backup and recovery (RTO measured in hours, not days) without the maintenance and management headaches.
• Improve the reliability of recovery.
• Protect all data, not just some of it.
• Reduce IT operational and hardware costs.

At the same time, this convergence approach makes it possible for IT to make the cloud the center of their backup universe so they can take advantage of the infinite scalability of the cloud. This means when data growth increases, you buy more cloud, not another appliance.

How Does This Eliminate Appliance Sizing Risk?

With built-in cloud spillover (think cloud storage gateway technology), your hybrid appliance automatically streams data from your on-premise device to the cloud, and grows per your own data retention rules. Having the ability to determine what stays local while enabling a “bottomless cloud” backup model (because everything is streaming there) does two things:

1. You can buy a smaller device since your data’s ultimate home is the cloud, not the appliance.
2. You don’t have to worry about a forklift upgrade when you’ve hit the upper storage limit of your appliance, since you should never hit that ceiling.

So, when it comes to appliance sizing, you can completely avoid the scenarios described above. This also simplifies the appliance sizing process so that it looks like this:

Key Takeaway

Eliminating appliance-sizing risk is the tip of the iceberg when you take steps to simplify backup. Embracing a new approach to backup puts your company in a better position to reap the monetary savings and efficiency gains from the cloud. It’s how tomorrow’s backup works, and we can help you get there. We provide a hybrid cloud solution that’s wickedly fast, scales the way the cloud was meant to, and so simple our customers tell us that they spend just a few minutes a week managing it. Check out this e-book to help you decide if it’s time to break up with your backup and what requirements your next-gen cloud backup solution should have.

Ken Garcia is the director of content marketing at Infrascale. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.