Ten Tips to Ease the Backup Appliance Selection Process

Make sure the PBBA you purchase today will need your needs as data continues to grow in the future.

In our earlier Buying Guide for Purpose Built Backup Appliances (PBBAs), we covered the state of the market and the leaders in this space.

“PBBAs are a great way for organizations to streamline, remove complexity and reduce the cost involved in protecting data,” said Greg Schulz, an analyst at StorageIO Group. “They should be thought of as hyper-converged data protection appliances as they provide similar benefits of convergence without the hype. The PBBA should work for you instead of you going to work for it.”

Here are some key tips on how to make PBBAs work for you.

1. Plan for the Future

It may seem obvious, but so often organizations don’t plan for the future where data protection is concerned. Think about how your data protection needs are going to evolve over the next three to five years. Will you have more applications? More remote offices? More data? Are your IT staff and budgets going to keep pace with data growth?

“We have to get smarter about consolidating our data center activities, especially where data protection is concerned,” said Andrew Dickerson, senior manager, storage product marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “Look at how you are going to meet your restore SLAs given your current data growth.”

2. Control Costs with a Single Technology

Once upon a time, there were appliances that did only deduplication. Then they incorporated backup, disaster recovery (DR), WAN optimization and more. These days, there is no point in buying an appliance to fulfill only one or two of these functions.

“Having a single technology solution that is compatible across the enterprise and compatible with your chosen backup applications should save a significant amount of capital expenditure and operational expenditure through reduced backup management, lower maintenance costs, reduced data center floor space and cooling as well as reducing your network bandwidth” said Dickerson. “Automate as much as possible, including data in any remote sites that you have.”

3. Quote for the Future

Too often, a vendor quote will work for today but not necessarily in a few months’ time, when you may have to buy more primary storage. So incorporate perceived future needs into your request for quote. That way, you can see how each approach addresses rampant storage costs and how high the cost of adding capacity might escalate.

“When you get quotes from your vendors, ensure you know what data growth your chosen vendor has allowed for in their quote,” said Dickerson.

4. Look for Flexibility

Levi Norman, director of product marketing, IBM Systems, enterprise storage, stresses flexibility as the IT industry and requirements can change rapidly. Too many organizations have failed to grasp new trends such as virtualization, DevOps or flash, and they have ended up with new infrastructures that are labeled "legacy" within six months.

“Users must be able to respond to changes and requirements quickly and with manageable solutions,” said Norman. “Often a PBBA is the fastest deployment method in a back-up environment. Enterprises should take the time to plan for the future, look at open APIs like File System support to prevent lock-in to any specific vendor.”

5. Reduce Backup Siloes

It is a reality of modern IT environments that people like to implement their own technologies and choose their own platforms. But this can cause problems and add costs.

“Are your DBAs and VMware admins deploying their own backup appliances, creating silos in your environment?” asked Caitlin Gordon, director of data protection product marketing, EMC. “Find a way that you can consolidate to reduce costs while still enabling admins to protect their environments natively.”

6. Give Emphasis to Deduplication

There are many technologies rolled into the latest PBBAs. But deduplication should probably be given the most attention as it has a big impact on capacity requirements and the amount of time IT has to spend dealing with backup administration and other tasks. So pay attention to the actual dedupe rates you can get from a prospective appliance.

“Not all deduplication technology is created equal, and maximizing your dedupe rates means minimizing your cost,” said Gordon. “This requires a combination of: the right dedupe technology and the ability to consolidate as many protection workloads on a single platform as possible.”

7. Look for Simplicity

A data protection solution should make your life easier—not make more work for the people managing your environment. If it doesn’t simplify the process by providing all of the components necessary to complete the backup process, proceed with caution.

“Look to simplify whenever possible, especially by consolidating point products,” said Phil Wandrei, senior manager, product marketing at Veritas. “While point products can be great to address an immediate or short-term problem, over time they can become a time drain on your staff. Consider a backup solution that has the flexibility to consolidate point products when they are due to be refreshed (such as build-your-media servers, VTLs, dedupe storage, etc.).”

8. Validate for Enterprise Scale

Scalability is crucial. Maybe a candidate appliance can scale reasonably well. But what happens when storage demands increase by 10 times? This isn’t unrealistic when you look at trends such as Big Data, mobility, the Internet of Everything and more.

“We often hear customers lament that their solution does not scale when they need it to 12 to 18 months after purchase,” said Wandrei. “While they did a proof of concept, and it met their initial needs, it no longer is able to handle the data growth and backup and recovery performance suffers.”

9. Look at Licensing

Many take into account overall storage capacity growth and hardware needs. But licensing costs may sometimes be missed during the selection costs. Therefore, it is wise to ensure you understand your software and hardware licensing commitments, and forecast these expenses about five years ahead.

“While it is easy to do a three-year budget over the life of the product, the greater insight comes when it is time to refresh the hardware,” said Wandrei. “In addition, check if the software license is transferable, how retention rates or the number of copies may impact licensing, and if it is based on front-end or backup-end capacity.”

10. Remember the Applications and Where They Are Heading

It’s a good idea to understand where your business applications will be running a few years from the time you purchase a PBBA.

“Perhaps you have some applications in the cloud now and some on premises in both physical and virtual instances, which will most likely change over the next couple of years,” said Tony Liau, senior PMM, data protection solutions, Barracuda. Make sure your backup solution can protect all the legacy physical environments, the virtual servers you have deployed in the last three-to-five years, and the cloud infrastructure that is surely coming.”

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