Sophisticated backup, recovery and archiving (BuRA) solutions have, up to now, been limited to larger organisations because of cost, complexity and security issues. However, thanks to new developments in this field, the efficient, tiered data storage and archiving technologies associated with BuRA are now becoming available to small and medium sized businesses (SMBs).
According to Mike Hamilton, MD of Channel Data, a basket of relevant BuRA solutions is now capable of being delivered under one umbrella, assisting integration and reseller organisations to offer consolidated systems to their clients.
“A typical BuRA portfolio from a vendor such as EMC includes data profiling and analysis software, intelligent archiving fundamentals, backup and recovery solutions,” he says.
“Up to now these elements were introduced to organisations separately and often from independent suppliers with high integration costs being a substantial part of what was seen as a major investment in IT infrastructure.
Integrated BuRA solution will help users to improve efficiencies by creating an online, active archive of non-changing data assets allowing them to focus their backup efforts on actively changing data.
Hamilton says significant savings can be realised. “Such a solution reduces storage acquisition costs. Let’s assume that five terabytes of high-end storage costs R1.5 million at R300 per gigabyte. Research reveals that in an average organisation around 80 percent of this data will be ‘inactive’ and so migrating four terabytes data to low-end disk storage – which costs around R30 per gigabyte – would result in savings of around R1 million.
“Taking the concept one step further and migrating it to tape – at around R10 per gigabyte – would mean overall savings would be in the region of R1.2 million.”
He adds that today’s BuRA technologies open doors to new SMB users who have high data storage requirements – such as organisations in financial, insurance and manufacturing environments.
“Efficient and reliable backup and recovery can be a struggle for organisations dealing with huge data growth,” adds Hamilton. “The BuRA approach lets them focus on efficiently backing up new content and updated operational data —while archiving unchanged, infrequently accessed files.”
