June Issue of the Taos Newsletter: Storage

Reducing the Cost of Backups – A Matter of Strategic Focus

by Jamie Rutledge, Senior Director, Enterprise Technology Services, Corio, as summarized by Jerry Brocklehurst

Ever since IBM introduced the model 3340 hard disk drive in 1973 with a whopping 60MB of storage¹, hard disk storage has continued grow in capacity, speed, and reliability and yet drop almost exponentially in cost. And, as storage gets cheaper and cheaper, companies find that usage is growing as rapidly as the cost is dropping. Today, the key issue is not the cost of the storage itself, but the cost associated with the maintenance and backup of that storage. How does IT keep those costs from spiraling out of control at the same time that users are demanding more capacity?

In a recent Experts in the Industry presentation hosted at Taos, Jamie Rutledge of Corio offered his insight into the subject of backup costs.  His conclusion? By taking a focused look at backup requirements in a way that is both realistic and strategic, companies can reduce their backup costs dramatically.

The Business Objectives

So what exactly does “a strategic look at storage” mean? The starting point is to first outline and understand the relevant business objectives and challenges, being sure to include the concerns of all those involved. A typical set of such objectives might include the following:

• Reduce backup costs and cost per Gigabyte by 50%
• Establish a methodology to measure backup success
• Provide visibility to backups
• Meet recovery needs

From this, one can see that the responsible IT Manager must carefully balance the needs both across and up-and-down within the company. For example, C-Level executives will be most interested in the reduction of costs. But equally important are the goals of the IT organization to be able to measure success and provide visibility for that success – all while meeting the needs of the user community to deliver successful recovery of critical data if and when the need arises.

Backups Are Expensive

Once the appropriate goals are established, the next step is to do a complete “inventory” of everything that contributes to the cost and then identify changes that will have the greatest impact. It will be important to work with the finance team to properly model and calculate the real costs. The list can be quite extensive:

• Infrastructure
• Hardware maintenance
• Power consumption and physical space
• Tapes
• Additional drives, slots, and tapes
• Remote hands for tape handling
• Backup node
• Backup network
• Backup master server license
• Backup client software license
• Software maintenance
• Offsite storage
• Reporting and monitoring tools
• DBA, SA, and Backup Admin

Going through the cost assessment process, the IT Manager might find the cost of infrastructure, the cost of hardware maintenance, and the power usage and physical space associated with backups are relatively inexpensive when compared to other components.

Tapes, for example, can be one of the most expensive elements. This includes not only the cost of the tape itself, but also many associated costs such as the time it takes to process purchase orders, the time to handle, label, and inventory the tapes, and the cost of not having sufficient tape when needed. Of course, one way to save costs is to reuse tape. But then, it’s important to establish tape retention, re-use, and management policies that efficiently optimize the trade-offs between the careful tracking and extra handling of reused tapes versus the cost of purchasing and storing new tapes.

Other expensive elements include software licenses, software maintenance, and the labor required to perform backups.

A Two Prong Approach to Reducing Costs

With so many elements to consider, where does one begin? A good approach is to divide the task into two major categories: 1) Reduce the direct cost per Gigabyte (such as equipment, materials, labor, license fees, etc.), and 2) Reduce the volume of backups performed.

In the first category, there are many direct cost contributors that can be addressed, starting with vendors. By “shopping around” and renegotiating with current vendors, one might be able to realize a 5, 10, or even as much as a 20% cost savings right off the top. Other contributing factors might include:

Technology refresh: When reviewing existing vendors, it pays to review the technology at the same time. Similar to the cost of storage, the cost of backup hardware is also dropping dramatically. It might be possible to upgrade to more efficient hardware (which, in itself has a cost benefit) and justify those upgrades based on the savings in maintenance costs alone (a second benefit).

Tape retention: Consider how long it is really necessary to retain daily, weekly, and monthly backups. For example, an IT Manager might determine that it’s only necessary to keep backups for all non-production environments one month. By determining a “best practice” that is realistic, he or she might be able to greatly reduce the number of tapes required.

Disk based backups for non-production and incrementals: A related consideration is that the only purpose for tape is to be able to store backups offsite. One might consider moving to a disk based solution for non-critical backups and eliminating tape all together in those cases.

Backup frequency: Re-evaluate the frequency of full production backups. This could produce a huge savings if full backups are currently performed on a daily basis when 3 or 4 times per week might be adequate.

Offsite standard: How often are tapes sent offsite? Again, perhaps something less than daily is sufficient and could result in not only fewer tapes, but also reduced contract and labor costs.

Push to reduce labor cost: While this may seem obvious, it may not always be true that the lowest cost personnel in the IT organization is doing the footwork and legwork to perform the backups. It pays to be sure the most expensive and the least expensive talent is doing work appropriate to their costs.

The second category – reducing backup volume – can allow for creativity and actually be the most fun to approach. Reduction of backup volume provides the obvious benefit of reduced material cost as well as labor cost. This category includes:

Automated database maintenance, including clean up of unneeded files: As any and all savvy IT Managers know, there are a lot of unneeded, redundant, outdated, and simply unnecessary files lingering in many places. Scripts can be easily written to search for and purge these files on a regular basis.

Exclude list: Meet with users and ask them to justify why each file must be backed up. For example, if data files can be more easily re-created than restored, does it really make sense to include them in the backup process? Create a standard for which files to exclude during the various backups – daily, weekly, monthly – and implement that standard across all data centers. Then, adhere to it.

Archive: Again, meet with the various users and departments to determine which files and data can be permanently archived. Such data as Accounts Payable information older than 2 years is a good candidate for archiving. By meeting with each department, one can probably find a significant amount of data to be archived comfortably.

File structure layout: By implementing a standard OFA structure between systems teams and database admin, the overall backup process can become more efficient. Also, by spreading file systems out, the recovery process becomes simpler if needed.

Backup volume reporting and visibility: There are many good tools available from such companies as Veritas and Bocada to help the IT Manager maintain visibility into the backup process. Obviously, an evaluation of which tools provide the most value should be included in the overall analysis of reducing backup costs.

On a final note, it is also important to develop a discipline around refresh, clone, and special backup needs. If application teams and other customers require special or non-standard backups, it might make sense for the IT Manager to charge back the associated costs to the appropriate departments.

The Final Result

In the final analysis, backup volume and cost doesn’t have to multiply along with the increase in storage as much as one might think. In fact, improvements as much as 2 to 1, or even 3 to 1 can be realized. Imagine the cost per Gigabyte of backups dropping as much as 70%. There is certainly a lot of value for the IT Manager to consider - not only in the cost savings, but also in the visibility to senior management for the overall success of the program, the success of the backup/restore process, and in higher customer satisfaction.

Jamie Rutledge is a Senior Director of Operations at Corio, with primary responsibility for infrastructure, including data center, network, storage, systems, and backup.

Corio, Inc. (NASDAQ: CRIO) is a leading enterprise application service provider (ASP). Corio Applications on Demand ^TM is a service that delivers enterprise applications from leading software vendors for a monthly fee. Corio provides infrastructure, applications management, professional services and Corio iSRVCE technology resource management (TRM) software. Corio guarantees system reliability through service level agreements (SLA's) and allows customers to 'pay-as-you-go,' minimizing expensive upfront project costs, improving return on investment (ROI) and reducing IT cost overall. Additional information about Corio is available at www.corio.com.

1 “A Brief History of the Hard Disk Drive,” by Charles Kozierok, The PC Guide, http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/hist.htm