Lowering Backup and Recovery Costs with Open Infrastructure
Every IT administrator knows that IT infrastructure is meant to facilitate effective usage of the business applications that run on it. Yet as IT teams continue to innovate and grow, the resulting IT environment can inadvertently become one of inflexibility and high cost, both of which prevent IT staff from effectively supporting the business.
The rapidly evolving IT landscape provides enterprises with new opportunities, such as leveraging Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) over expensive new hardware - but only if their current infrastructure is flexible enough to allow it. Constrained IT budgets demand that enterprises manage their infrastructure costs carefully, but enterprises using vendor-specific infrastructure and storage often struggle to keep infrastructure costs under control.
This creates problems for companies large and small. Smaller IT teams often must choose between pricey infrastructure add-ons or core functionality such as cloud-based services, like data backup. Even teams with larger budgets may end up choosing products that address only one requirement rather than multi-platform solutions that work well together. These single solutions not only end up costing more overall, but result in an infrastructure that's overly complex, inflexible and further locks users in.
Offering a solution to these challenges is open storage infrastructure, powered by software-driven architecture. Open storage infrastructure effectively ends the problems of integration, troubleshooting, fixes, patches, installation setup time and the requirements for highly skilled hardware and operating system staff. It also tackles the inflexibility of branded storage solutions, reducing the risks, costs and scalability issues related to hardware, software, file systems, operations and human capital.
When applied to backup and recovery, open storage infrastructure disintermediates expensive storage software stacks from expensive hardware. This software-defined option allows IT service providers to further control backup infrastructure costs and scalability/management concerns. It is a fundamental shift away from traditional storage that allows the extension of benefits directly to the technology end user – offering enhanced reliability at lower cost. The concept better serves service providers to support their customers with efficient high availability infrastructure.
The newly released Asigra Cloud Backup™ Version 13 includes optimised support for open infrastructure choices like FreeBSD on ZFS and CentOS running on commodity hardware and storage. With this option, service providers establish backup vaults on a storage platform that offers excellent scalability and reliability without the cost concerns or restrictions imposed by providers of branded storage.
Partnered with Asigra, Databarracks delivers premium, secure data protection solutions to meet rigorous recovery time objectives (RTOs) for the most demanding requirements. The interoperability of Asigra Cloud Backup and FreeBSD on ZFS and CentOS presents new opportunities in how backup infrastructure is architected across IaaS or private clouds on less expensive computing platforms. High performance data recovery, whether for physical, virtual, cloud-based or mobile environments, has never been more complete or budget friendly.
Oliver Mather, Technical Director, Databarracks