When people talk about backup solutions, they are typically thinking of four different but related technologies: online backups, offline backups, disaster recovery and archival. Online backup systems (also known as hotswap or redundant systems) should support seamless and transparent failure over while the system is running. Offline backups require manual intervention and potentially an outage in order to recover your IT systems, disaster recovery (also known as business continuity) ensures that you don't affect the ongoing business operations in the event of a calamity external to your IT infrastructure, and archival ensures that you can retrieve historical information when requested.
It is important to distinguish what scenarios are covered by a backup solution, so that when an unplanned event happens, you are aware of what is protected, and what remains unprotected. In a typical small business environment, the server will be protected by a RAID array which allows for the failure of one or more hard disks, with online recovery, and have ECC memory, which corrects single bit errors in the volitile memory (RAM) inside the computer. The server and network equipment will be connected to an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) which allows the server equipment to be safely shutdown in the event of a power outage, as well as protecting it from power spikes and underruns. These are all online backup systems, and will automatically take over should the system stop running correctly, and send out a notification using System Manager. Learn more about System Manager. >>>
Should you accidentally delete a file which is not protected by VSS, or your computer experience a catastrophic failure that cannot be recovered from by the online systems, you will need to go to an offline backup. Offline backups are the second line of protection which require manual intervention and potentially an outage of the IT systems. When considering offline backup systems, there are two key concepts you need to have in mind: the recovery point objective (RPO) and the recovery time objective (RTO). By defining your RPO and RTO requirements, you can then calculate the total cost to your business of a potential outage, and use this figure to calculate how much you should be spending on your backup solution.
The recovery point objective (RPO) is the point in time which you can recover back to. For a typical offline backup solution, which starts running at 10 pm every weeknight, the RPO is the the point at which you started adding more data to the system following the backup. For a typical business day, if your systems fail at 1 pm on a Tuesday, the RPO will be 8:30 am that morning, when you first started using your IT systems for the day.
The recovery time objective (RTO) is the time required to get the offline backup up and running and fully operational. Use a tape based backup system with a complete verified backup of the server and assuming you have no requirement for additional hardware, the RTO is typically 2-4 hours in the best case scenario.
The cost to your business - based on your staffing labour costs alone - for a failure that requires you go to offline backup to recover is the sum of the RTO + RPO times the cost of an hour of downtime. You can use the IT Cost calculator to determine the cost of an hour of downtime to your business, but for a typical 5 person company which has to go to an offline backup to recover their server, where the RPO is the start of the business day, and the RTO is the end of the same business day, the total cost is around $2400. An IT company which is able to completely restore a server the same working day using an offline backup, is delivering an excellent level of service. Use the IT Cost Calculator to determine the cost of IT downtime in your business. >>>
The above figure is a best case scenario, and excludes the lost cost of cashflow and customer goodwill caused by the outage, or the risks of hardware failure or backups not running correctly. When hardware fails, warranty replacement is usually next day delivery, increasing the recovery cost of the above scenario by 150% - when hardware is out of warranty, you may be required to purchase replacement equipment, at a cost of days of downtime plus parts and labour cost. A Managed Hardware agreement will ensure that you have the replacement hardware available to you. >>>
Infovault Onsite provides an RPO of a maximum of 15 minutes by backing up your servers every 15 minutes and provides continuous online recovery. In the event of your server failing, the Infovault Onsite solution will automatically fail over to a virtualised restore of that server without requiring any intervention. This reduces the cost of the above best case recovery scenario to around 3% of the estimated figure - more if you value the cashflow of your business and your customer's good will. Learn more about Infovault. >>>