For data centers, uptime isn’t the most important thing—it’s the only thing that matters. According to Ponemon Institute, the cost of downtime now exceeds $9,000 a minute, putting the per-hour cost of downtime over a half-million dollars.1 Many organizations reported unplanned outages that soared into the millions of dollars until systems could be fully restored to operational status.
For many organizations, a disastrous outage can be a death knell. FEMA says that fully 25% of companies that are hit by a disaster never reopen at all.2
The threat landscape for natural disasters is evolving in step with the global climate. One need look no further than the recent devastation of Southwest Florida by hurricane Ian or Puerto Rico’s island-wide power outage to see that disaster can strike anywhere with little or no warning. Natural disasters, including fires, electrical grid failures, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and tsunamis, are on the rise worldwide.
One of the major disaster recovery (DR) decisions is where to physically store backup data—on premises or in the cloud. There are pros and cons to both. If on premises, the backup storage infrastructure is subject to the same conditions as the primary storage site and can thus be damaged in a natural disaster. If in the cloud, such as with Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, backup storage is physically separate but there is the issue of the bandwidth necessary to restore data to the primary site.
Choosing ExaGrid backup storage solutions can help alleviate business continuity and DR challenges in several ways. First, organizations have the flexibility to deploy ExaGrid’s DR solution either on premises or in the cloud to ensure that backups will survive even the worst disasters. And ExaGrid offers the strongest security posture possible, since even ransomware can’t penetrate the retention repository—thanks to a non-network-facing repository tier, a delayed delete policy and the immutable nature of deduplicated backups stored in that layer. Otherwise compromised systems can safely restore to a known good state, thwarting ransomware attempts.
ExaGrid also offers high-performance backup and restores, as its scalable architecture provides adaptive deduplication that deduplicates and replicates in parallel streams. As the amount of storage being backed up increases, so does the processing and the network components to ensure smooth scaling up to nearly 2.7 petabytes.
ExaGrid offers a 50:1 bandwidth efficiency to get the most out of existing connectivity, and data is encrypted over the WAN to replication sites to ensure safe and secure transfers. Organizations can even configure the DR site to “all repository” storage, which can save significant costs. The result is a rock-solid backup storage solution that enables organizations to meet strong on-site or off-site recovery time and recovery point objectives.
1 “Cost of Data Center Outages,” Ponemon Institute, January 2016
2 “Stay in Business After a Disaster by Planning Ahead,” FEMA, Oct. 20, 2018
