It seems everyone is facing discouraging budget cuts at the same time they’re facing unprecedented data growth. It’s a conundrum that’s here to stay – but, you know what they say: when the going gets tough, the tough figure out how to use what they’ve got while still dreaming of a shiny new rack of servers. Wait, is that the saying?
Smart IT administrators will refuse to compromise data integrity just because a few hundred thousand dollars got snatched from their budget. If you are revamping your backup and recovery plan to account for growing data, here are three ways you can maximize the use of your existing infrastructure and save money without sacrificing safety:
- Love the WAN You’re With: Choose backup and recovery software that works with your existing WAN. Replication software should allow you to either “throttle” the data queue, or let you control when backups are transmitted so it won’t disrupt daily traffic. If you can’t throttle, then it should allow you to compress the data. Good software will allow you to do both.
- Send only changes: It’s not necessary to send the same data over and over again – it’s inefficient and takes up processing power and bandwidth. That terabyte of data that you have to protect across a T1 is not going to fit in within your 8 eight hour backup window, so how about just moving the changes instead of everything? Replicating only the changed data also saves you space on your repository, as you are only storing one copy of the information, versus multiple copies that a full backup would require.
- Consider the Cloud: The undeniably awesome thing about cloud storage is you only pay for what you need and you don’t need to add one single piece of hardware or infrastructure to use it. There’s no reason to add to or build a data center when someone has already built one for you. And it probably runs on wind energy or the happy dreams of little fluffy bunnies. Cloud backup and recovery can be fully automated and storage can scale automatically too, saving you administrative time. And hey, if it’s good enough for the feds, it’s good enough for you.
We’re partial to our software, of course, but when you’re shopping around for backup and recovery software be sure to consider software that lets you use your existing infrastructure.
Want to hear more about what we can offer? Click here to learn how we can help you protect physical or virtual servers on any platform – using your existing infrastructure – or download our popular One Essential Guide to Disaster Recovery.
