The 3 main options that a medium sized company has when building a data disaster recovery strategy are:
1. Physically moving tapes or drives offsite.
2. Replicating backup data between offices or to an offsite co-lo data center
3. DR-as-a-service from the cloud
This post will address the best situations for each solution, the disadvantages, and the always crucial – costs of each.
1. Physically moving tapes or drives offsite.
As discussed in yesterday’s post, taking tape backups offsite is the original data disaster recovery plan. It still works, and most companies have tape equipment they can use for DR.
The best situation for a tape-based DR strategy is when a company’s RTO can be comfortably in the 2-5 day range. A retail business or a school that will be closed after a natural disaster, fire, or major theft is an example of an organization that can comfortably leverage offsite tape backups for DR.
The main disadvantage of tape-based DR is in day-to-day operations. The amount of effort it takes to replace a single accidentally deleted file or folder means that some user files simply go unrecovered.
The cost of maintaining a tape DR plan is low when you consider that the hardware has already been paid for, but it also creeps up over time. For example, it costs about $5,225 a year for weekly tape pick-up and drop-off according to an analysis we did using a sample environment with 2TB and 20 endpoints.
2. Replicating backup data between offices or to an offsite co-lo data center.
This is a popular choice for IT directors who have multiple offices with IT assets in each. There’s a lot of flexibility for “roll-your-own” solutions with this approach, and it’s even possible to use existing hardware this way also. There are plenty of backup software options that will let you use old fileservers as a backup target and then replicate the backup server in the main office to one in a remote office.
The key benefit is replication. In case of a disaster in the main office, you can VPN into the remote backup server and start to recover. This works just as well for production server crashes in the main office and helping users with their accidentally deleted folders.
The costs of this solution vary widely. If you happen to have multiple offices with existing IT assets then, just like above, it’s possible to get disaster recovery ready with just a few extra licenses for the backup software. However, if you don’t have a remote office, renting rack space in a local co-lo data center can get very expensive with the space, power, and management fees.
Alternatively, buying multiple backup appliances for different offices to replicate between can be a way to get strong data protection. Over a few TB, the price of multiple appliances starts to get pretty high, but some CFOs prefer a big up-front cost they can amortize, rather than a regular monthly bill.
3. DR-as-a-Service from the cloud.
A cloud, or online, data disaster recovery strategy has the most advantages for small IT teams with over 1TB of backup data that don’t have time manage multiple data centers or tape rotation schedules. Double that for companies that have remote offices without their own IT assets.
Obviously, there are a ton of different cloud backup and storage vendors, but to really use the cloud for DR the data has to be a replica of your live file system in its native format. Having a replica file system lets end users recover their own individual files over the web, lets IT recover to dissimilar hardware, and have complete control over which files and databases are restored first.
The costs for cloud data disaster recovery are mostly driven by the size of data being protected and the level of security and support available. For example, Zetta costs $225 a month to replicate 500GB of data in the cloud. Since we have enterprise-grade security infrastructure, SSAE-16 audited service processes, and 24×7 U.S. based support, we cost more than using a backup software with one of the big cloud storage providers.
It can be hard to strike a balance between recoverability performance and cost for a DR solution. Hit us up if you want to bounce some ideas off of our backup specialists. If your environment isn’t a fit for our service we’ll help you find what is. If your environment is a fit for our service, we’ll get your data protected in a matter of minutes.
