One of the things that weigh on an IT director’s mind is how he/she can keep up with their company’s growth in the data center. These areas include server growth, application growth, bandwidth and network growth, and just as important, data growth. In addition, how do they keep all that up with limited budget, both from a CapEx and OpEx perspective?
In the real world, the amount of money spent dictates scalability, because as the items I mentioned grow within the data center and beyond, the cost grows at an accelerated rate. The reason is because every piece of hardware/infrastructure added affects the growth of the network, storage, server capacity, resource utilization, etc. It’s like the ripple effect of tossing a pebble into a still pond. This makes real-life scalability follow the red line in the graph below. What the green line represents is if the cost per added data center piece always stayed the same, and didn’t affect all the other parts in the environment. But if you buy more servers, resources need to increase like bandwidth, storage, power, etc…you get the picture. Unless you have infinite funding, infinite scalability is like unicorns, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and immortality! Good luck bagging any of those!
Now here at Symantec, we always strive to engineer our backup products to provide easy scalability without complexity as our customers grow, and since we’ve been doing this for quite some time, we certainly know a thing or two about large environments. Did you know these Symantec facts?
- NetBackup protects 90 of the top 100 global companies
- Some of NetBackup’s largest installs scale beyond 11 petabytes of front end protection
- NetBackup has been around 20+ years providing a mature and scalable true-enterprise solution
- Is still the market leader in the backup and recovery market
But what’s important to note is, it’s not about how much footprint we can put into a customer’s environment that always dictates scalability success, it’s also about reducing the amount of traditional client and server software installs, yet still being able to protect their entire environment, end to end. This means virtual, physical, cloud and DR protection. The old adage “less is more” never has rung more true than it has in today’s data center. IT departments have had to do much more with less resources and funding. NetBackup V-Ray technology protects thousands of VM’s without needing individual agents per VM or a physical backup proxy server for every 5 or so ESX hosts. We also don’t make customers pay the bloated storage tax when setting up DR for your backup and recovery environment.
Finally, when it comes to cost savings and scalability, we have the differentiating NetBackup appliances. It’s costly, time consuming and often downright painful to spec out and build your own backup server, and make sure it runs optimally and with a fully supported configuration. The ability to plug in an appliance for either a server refresh, or to add to scale your existing environment has never had our customers so excited and yes, relieved!
But even after providing all that information on how NetBackup eases the pain of scalability, and all the points made about lower cost, we still won’t promise “infinite scalability”. You see, promising such a thing would both deceive and insult our customers with a misconception that money is no object. We’re about working on real-life enhancements. We’re always working on providing the best backup and recovery solution on the market, and listening to our 36,000+ customers for feedback to make our product stronger, more flexible and more efficient every new release.
However, if you still quest for infinite scalability, and you have a limitless budget and still believe the Tooth Fairy is real, then there’s still a vendor out there for you.
For more information on better backups with NetBackup, please visit us at:
