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Trimming the Costs of Online Backup & Recovery

If you read the title to this article and immediately conjured up images of a talking computer with a deep red glowing light and a nasty attitude, then you are definitely showing your age- or your passion for sci-fi movies. At the risk of offending the hardcore fans, the focus of this piece is not on the antagonist super computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but a concept nonetheless that leaves a bitter taste in our mouths. For the purposes of this article, HAL is an acronym that represents three things that you should never pay for with an online backup service provider. Let’s examine some of the “features” that some online service providers charge for, and what other providers have done to eliminate these costs.

Hardware
Agents
Licensing

The first liability in our acronym is hardware. The online backup concept was centered around simplifying the backup process, eliminating costly tape-based hardware, and reducing the number of potential points of failure in the backup system. If you again find yourself spending company resources on multiple hardware devices, then haven’t you returned to one of the reasons your company left behind tapes in the first place? The solution- don’t pay for extra hardware! Sounds too simple, but it really is that clear cut. Some low end service providers make their money from selling you extremely expensive and extremely complex hardware devices. At the same time, the software they employ offers limited functionality and flexibility, given the hardware-centric nature of the approach. Choosing an upper tier service provider will alleviate both of these concerns. Remove the reliance on extraneous hardware (and therefore the costs), and let the power of a robust, user friendly software work for you.

Our second liability - agents. An agent is a piece of software that resides on a computer as part of the backup system. Its purpose is to communicate what data from which machine is to be transferred to a particular storage location for backup. Every online backup solution employs the use of an agent(s), however, the manner in which they use them could seriously affect the effectiveness and cost of your backup and recovery process. For instance, some service providers require that an agent be installed on every machine in the enterprise so that it can back up to the server and the offsite vault. What happens when you have a complete site loss? Once you have replaced the physical hardware that was destroyed, you must also install the agent on each machine to recover data. This is not only time intensive for larger disasters, but it also takes IT personnel resources away from other important tasks. You are paying for these spent resources because of the need to install agent software on each computer in the network. The better option, seen with the leading providers, is found with agent-less technology. In this configuration, an agent is only installed on the machine that collects the data to be sent to the offsite location. “One and done” per LAN network. There is no need to install software on any other machines in the LAN to have them fully backed up. If the backup machine is lost in a disaster, a bare metal restore will quickly and easily replace not just the data, but the system state, applications, registry settings, and the agent software that allows the affected computers to be restored back to their last backup state.

Our final liability is licensing. When you boil everything down, the real costs incurred by the service provider lie in the amount of data that is being housed in their vault. If one hundred computers in the enterprise yield 200 GB of total storage in the offline vault, it costs the service provider the very same as an enterprise with 500 computers storing the exact same amount of data. I.E., 100 Machines with 200 GB = 500 Machines with 200 GB.

Some service providers will charge you a licensing fee for each additional computer that is added to the network to be backed up. We again return to the simple solution- don’t pay for licensing fees! Choose a service provider that charges you for the amount of data that you store, not how many machines you have on your network. In this scenario, you pay as you grow for your data, not for the permission to install their agent on all of your machines.

What is the focus with your service provider? Is it looking for more ways to increase the costs for the services they provide, or is it on providing a cost effective solution to your business needs? You can trim the extra fees by cutting HAL costs out of your choice for an online backup service provider. And no worries, you can always rent 2001: A Space Odyssey on DVD.

Author Travis Prim is a technical writer for CRC