The Human Cost of Data Backup Sprawl

Eric Silva is Director, Product Marketing, Sepaton, Inc. He has more than thirteen years of experience in the storage industry, and more than five years of hands-on experience as an IT director and an IT solutions architect.

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As discussed in the recent article, The Hidden Costs of Sprawl – Total Cost of Ownership, many large enterprise data centers have taken an “add another system” approach to dealing with rapid backup data growth. With this approach, they have simply added more single-node, disk-based backup targets every time they run out of capacity, or fail to meet their backup windows.

In an enterprise data center, where data is measured in tens of terabytes and growing at rate of 20 to40 percent compounded annually, the “add another system” approach often takes a toll on the human beings who manage the IT data center. Large organizations can mitigate this human toll by consolidating data backups onto enterprise-class systems that are designed to enable a single administrator to manage tens of petabytes without stress. They not only scale to meet growing performance and capacity needs, but also automate a variety of disk management, monitoring and reporting tasks.

Disruption to Ongoing Backup Processes

Every time a new backup target is added in a non-scalable environment, IT staff face the time-consuming tasks of re-allocating backup volumes, load balancing all of the backup systems in the environment, and tuning the entire environment to restore optimal efficiency. They also need to make difficult decisions about how to go about dividing their backup volumes among existing and new systems.

For example, should they divide the backup onto multiple systems? Move backups to the new system and let the older data expire off the older systems? Or, should they disrupt ongoing operations for a significant change in backup strategy or use a less disruptive, more costly "Band-Aid" approach? As a result, adding a backup target to a non-scalable backup environment means increasing workloads, adding complexity, and placing more stress on an IT organization.

A better alternative is to use a grid scalable system that enables IT staff to increase performance by adding processing nodes or to increase capacity by adding disk shelves. These systems integrate the added performance or capacity with existing resources and perform all load balancing, tuning and management tasks automatically and seamlessly, without disruption to ongoing operations or the need to make difficult decisions.

More Systems Mean More Maintenance

Every new machine added to the backup environment requires added IT time to maintain software licenses, upgrades, updates and patches as well and hardware maintenance. In short it means more tedious, time-consuming tasks for an IT staff that is probably already stretched thin.

With fully loaded full-time IT employees costing the company $150,000 per year, companies should look for ways to make better use of their time with systems that increase the terabyte (TB) of data that a single sys admin can safely manage. Consolidating backups onto a single, scalable system dramatically reduces total cost of ownership (TCO).

The Stress of Uncertainty

With key information about backups divided on multiple, individual systems, IT staff have more uncertainty to deal with and a harder time making holistic, informed decisions about their company-wide backup environments.

Enterprises should choose a solution that enables IT data managers to get fast, accurate information on the status of their entire backup environment. Robust dashboard functionality can not only enable a single administrator to manage more backup data, it can also enable them to reduce inefficiencies in their backup environment, plan for future capacity needs, and ensure restore Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are achievable. For example, a single dashboard on a grid scalable solution can put the following information at an administrator’s fingertips:

When Less is More. . .

While the impact on morale is harder to quantify, the human costs of sprawl can quickly affect the bottom line with increased staff turnover, low staff productivity, increased overtime. By consolidating backups and automating backup tasks, companies can free key IT staff for more productive and more gratifying work but most importantly achieve their mission; meeting their SLAs and reducing the business risk of data loss and downtime.

Scalable, enterprise-class systems also provide a tighter level of management control and reporting to ensure IT departments get the most value from their backup investment and more accurate planning for future needs.

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