It can be difficult to fathom the total lifetime cost of backup storage. Of course, there is the initial outlay for storage capacity, which, in the simplest form, is the amount of data to be backed up times the number of retention copies plus yearly data growth. In a world where everything seems to be software defined—even infrastructure as code—having everything readily available and backed up, including virtual machines and containers, is more important than ever.
Then there are ongoing costs over time, including maintaining storage, replacing failed hardware, and adding capacity in an exponential fashion as the amount of information we collect balloons year after year. If an enterprise keeps just a few quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily backups, the amount of disk storage required can easily exceed 10 times the organization’s total capacity and then some.
However, using a purpose-built backup storage solution from ExaGrid can actually reduce the total cost of ownership of backup storage while ensuring that backup windows are met and recovery point and recovery time service-level agreements for restore are maintained. These savings are made possible in part by aggressive deduplication, which also enables the use of low-cost storage options for longer term retention. Organizations using ExaGrid typically realize lower backup storage costs even when only four or more backup copies need to be retained—which is a bare minimum for most enterprises.
There is another big plus in adopting ExaGrid backup storage: ExaGrid’s two-tiered approach of landing zone and deduplicated backups. This multi-tiered approach allows for the most recent backups to be stored in an undeduplicated format for fast restores while all data, both current and retention, is deduplicated in the repository tier. The repository tier is non-network facing, meaning it cannot be seen or accessed by threat actors. The combination of a non-network-facing tier, a delayed delete policy and immutable data objects ensures that data is ready to be restored after a security event such as a ransomware attack. This alone can pay for itself by thwarting a single ransomware attempt.
ExaGrid also helps ensure that enterprises acquire only as much backup storge as they actually need. ExaGrid online calculators will compute the amount of storage needed for retention, data growth and disaster recovery to ensure a right-sized solution for every application while demonstrating backup storage cost savings compared with other backup offerings.
In today’s uncertain economy, ExaGrid offers three compelling ways to help manage backup storage costs. First, there is price protection. Organizations that adopt ExaGrid can enjoy the benefit of locking in the price for all their future appliance purchases for the next five years, delivering predictable costs for the CFO. Second, ExaGrid limits maintenance contract increases to 3% per year for even more peace of mind. Finally, with ExaGrid, there is never a need for forklift upgrades.
In addition, you can add as you grow by simply adding appliances into the scale-out system. The scale-out approach also eliminates disruptive and costly forklift upgrades. Any age and any size appliance can be mixed and matched to avoid product obsolescence.
