Discover the Real Cost of Backup & Recovery

The explosion in data volumes and increasing demands for data access has created rising complexity and inefficiencies in many backup and recovery environments. Open systems backup software is being stretched to its architectural limits and often service levels are only achieved through multiple backup servers, multiple vendor’s products and tape devices.

The backup and recovery policies in many organisations do not necessarily reflect the relative importance of the data to the business. The use of multiple service levels is still not widely used which can result in slow recovery times of critical data and expensive storage of non-critical data.

The hard cost to the business of backup and recovery operations is growing in three critical areas: man hours, backup software and tape usage. In addition, there is a growing soft cost to the business in terms of falling service levels, for example, meeting available backup windows or backup success rates. Of greatest concern is the ability of the organisation to recover from disruption, meeting recovery time and recovery point objectives.

Administration Time
The backup and recovery function is absorbing an increasing number of man hours. Gartner, the research organisation estimates that it takes over 50%-60% of a full time employee to manage each 12Tb of data using traditional backup methodologies. The use of multiple management servers and tape devices to meet shortening backup windows and longer retention periods often results in a proliferation of manual administration tasks.

Backup Software
As the quantity of physical and virtual servers grows, organisations are facing an ever increasing software cost both in terms of new licensing and annual maintenance. The cost of software has a direct impact on service levels as organisations keep costs down by foregoing enhanced functionality such as SAN backups or on-line backups or key databases.

Tape Usage
Despite the rise in popularity of disk-based backup, tape still remains dominant in the backup environment as a low cost storage medium, particularly for long term retention and off-site storage. However, managing multiple devices is expensive in terms of acquisition cost and maintenance.

Service Levels
There is a number of issues around service levels. Does the business have an infrastructure that can deliver the required service levels; do the services levels reflect the relative importance of the data to the business; does the business have the means of regularly reporting on the service levels achieved.

Tectrade

Tectrade offers a range of services and solutions aimed at reducing the cost of ownership and improving service levels in the backup and recovery environment.