Distributed backups

For many enterprises, incremental growth in servers and storage capacity brings them at some stage to this point: a fully distributed tape backup infrastructure.

Each server is backed up independently to a local tape drive. It’s a rare organisation that doesn’t use at least three different tape drive technologies and at least four different backup software packages, utilities or Unix scripts.

Distributed Backups

Advantages

• No single, large capital purchase required.
• Spending is tied to the purchase of new servers and thus spread over time.

Disadvantages

• Training and labour costs are high - due to the large amount of manual intervention needed even for day-to-day running of the system and it's highly vulnerable to human error. IT staff will need extensive training to stay current on many different backup software packages - most organisations find it hard enough to do well with only one software platform.
• Reliability of the solution is low - with so many different combinations of hardware and software in use, IT staff struggle to keep the system running smoothly. The distributed architecture makes tracking the success or failure of backups across the organisation extremely difficult, and when it's so difficult to identify backup failures they tend to go uncorrected for much longer.
• Hardware maintenance, tape media and tape hardware costs are high - drives and media are under-utilised due to the distributed architecture of the solution. As a result, more tape drives and tape cartridges are required than for more centralised approaches.
• Cost of verifying the operation of the solution is high - the integrity of backup data is often unclear, since it is so time consuming to perform verification tests and trial restores for so many independent backup servers. As a result corners are almost inevitably cut, leaving the business at risk of data loss due to unsuccessful backups.

Data Engines | ENSTOR can help you quantify the additional, ongoing costs associated with this environment and the scope for cost savings from a more centralised approach, such as the one that follows.