Many Organisations still rely on the traditional tape solution for backup. Why not? Tape is a cheap, tried and trusted technology providing high capacity, fast performance, portable and scalable benefits. You can back up your data and move it off-site to a secure facility of your choosing for retrieval at time of disaster. That all sounds great?
However, traditional tape based backup comes at a cost in terms of an upfront CAPEX investment to buy or refresh a tape system with enough capacity to meet your growth for the next 3 to 5 years. Include your support costs in terms of data centre footprint, power and man hours to manage and carry out labour intensive tape rotations along with the cost of a secure off-site storage facility. Add to the cost equation that 60% to 80% of the files on many organisations expensive Tier 1 high performance storage comprises of stale stagnant files that have not been accessed for at least 6 months! The failure to archive this stale data compounds the data growth problem and is the main reason why backup windows and restore times constantly increase. It’s no surprise that many organisations struggle to complete a full backup cycle because their tape solution does not scale to handle their growth in data without further CAPEX investment. Then consider the annual disaster recovery test where you need to prove to your business that you can recover data from recent backups and still meet the Recovery Time Objectives should the worst ever happen. That traditional tape solution doesn’t seem so cheap, simple or agile anymore.
From our experience the reluctance of organisations to archive is due to a lack of visibility of the type of files held on primary storage and when they were last accessed. This lack of visibility holds back an organisation’s ability to evaluate alternative solutions and make strategy decisions leaving little choice other than to buy more Tier 1 storage and grow their often already complex backup solutions.
If your tape backup solution is struggling to scale with the growth of data on your storage or you are looking for an alternative for backup and archiving, Colt has a secure, enterprise class solution that will scale as your data grows while you only pay for what you use. The first step to archiving and reducing the cost and complexity of your backup solution is to gain visibility of your data giving you with the information to make and justify changes to your backup strategy.
If you would like more information prior to the WebEx please send an email to Anthony.Brooks@colt.net
Make Do
01 June 2015
Recent posts
The importance of connectivity for smart manufacturing
Transform your factory with connectivity
