Once a business has settled on the right server technology and understands the benefits of installing quality hardware that will perform all day and all night for years to come, it is tempting to look for opportunities to save money on secondary storage like the hardware around the chosen backup solution.
Considered from a perspective where everything is running just fine, cheaper backup hardware seems like a great area to trim cost. When the inevitable happens (IT engineers quickly learn that all hardware is going to fail sooner or later) your backup becomes a vital lifeline to get the business back on its feet again quickly.
Let’s consider the common scenario of using a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device as a backup target. This is a great idea since it allows backup to finish more quickly and to take place more frequently than most tape-based solutions would. Crucially, restores can be done far more quickly than from most tape systems.
Home NAS device
Many people would first look at the capacity and then look at the price: gigabytes of storage per pound spent seems a reasonable yardstick. This would make the Western Digital My Book Edition II 2TB NAS look like a fantastic bargain at £190 or so. When you set it up with RAID 1 (mirroring) the storage space drops to 1TB but that might still be enough to back up a small server. To use any disk system without some kind of RAID, mirroring as a minimum, would be crazy. In our experience, such cheap NAS boxes are best for home use, as in this picture, where they are only written to by one machine at a time and aren’t expected to work too hard.
Small Business NAS Device
Scaling things up a bit, we have used higher capacity and higher specification NAS devices as backup targets in environments where cost is a factor. Like the Buffalo Terastation III 6TB NAS shown here, they run a version of Linux, have software RAID 1 or 5, a Gigabit network card and are built to a businesslike standard. Cost is around £900. These work well in general. However when they are written to by multiple servers at the same time, the internal hardware starts to reach its limits, which can result in missed backups. Vendor support can be patchy and is seldom speedy.
Entry Level Corporate NAS
For multiple server environments ISN use a higher grade NAS as a backup target: basically a server running a version of Windows 2008 known as Storage Server. These rack mountable enterprise level NAS devices have hardware RAID controllers, can have multiple network interfaces and a range of other hardware options. Prices start at about £2200 for the HP X1400 2TB model shown here. Dell’s PowerVault NX300 NAS is around the same price. These use standard parts and an operating system which is easy to support worldwide. If you add an onsite warranty pack, you can have an engineer from HP (or Dell) on your doorstep to fix it within 6 hours if it breaks . So much better than trying to revive a cheaper NAS at the time when you need it most.
Value doesn’t come cheap
As in so many situations, you do get what you pay for with IT hardware, just like you do with cars, cameras, smartphones, whatever. The cost of a £3000 NAS depreciated over 3 years is a minimal cost to a business compared to several days of downtime if an inadequate backup system fails to restore your critical data.
This short article only covers one aspect of data backup for businesses. We sell all the items mentioned above and many more besides. Please speak to your ISN account manager or our sales department on 020 7313 8300 to discuss whether your backup solution is robust enough for your business needs.