Protecting primary storage is significantly more expensive than the actual cost of primary storage. While, in most cases, data protection storage doesn’t need to perform at the same level as primary storage, it does need to provide acceptable performance, and it certainly needs to scale capacity much further than primary storage. The cost of data protection is more than just the hardware. The software costs can consume a large chunk of the IT budget. Data protection software licensing is also increasingly complex as vendors try to decide on how to appropriately charge customers whose data exists on bare metal servers, virtual servers and in the cloud.
What makes data protection particularly expensive are upgrades. The addition of a new application or workload to primary storage always impacts the data protection infrastructure but predicting precisely the size of the impact is almost impossible. Calculating the impact of an additional workload requires more than just confirming capacity requirements. It also requires making sure there is enough network throughput to receive the data being protected, and that there is enough processing power on the backup servers to catalog data capture, optimize how it is stored and then actually store the data.
Companies looking to get out of data protection infrastructure management are often told to look at cloud backup and cloud disaster recovery. Most cloud solutions are available as a service, so the organization can consume the data protection resources as it needs them. The cloud does offer excellent potential for protecting cloud-native applications and being a disaster recovery site for on-premises data, but for the rapid protection and recovery of on-premises data, it isn’t always the best option. Even the cloud business model has problems. Most organizations only expand their use of the cloud, they never take advantage of the ability to reduce their usage when the situation allows.
In our on demand webinar, Storage Switzerland, Veeam and HPE discuss a potential alternative to investing upfront in on-premises infrastructure or jumping all in with the cloud. The alternative is consumption based IT which enables the organization to maintain an on-premises infrastructure when it makes sense to and to use the public cloud when that option is a better fit. With consumption based IT, both sides of the hybrid cloud model are purchased the same way, as the organization needs them. Consumption based IT requires a consumption manager. The consumption manager makes sure all resources are being adequately used, enabling the customer to downsize IT resource utilization when possible but also being prepared for growth when it occurs.
Data Protection, because of its unpredictability, is an excellent starting use case for consumption based IT. Organizations can get the right data protection solution and then have that solution automatically grow with them as they grow, or shrink if a workload is shuttered or decreases in priority.
To learn more about Consumption Based IT and Consumption-Based Data Protection, join Storage Switzerland, Veeam and HPE on our on demand webinar “Consumption-Based Data Management Providing Peace of Mind”.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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