Hidden Costs Of Backup: Front-End Capacity

We are all too familiar with the concept of hidden costs. You work with suppliers and/or vendors, and it looks like their published pricing matches your expectations.

That is until you get their quote (or worse, the invoice), and you see a very different figure. What happened? There were fees, charges or the licensing models that you have not taken into account.

It could happen in every aspect of your life and work, and backup solutions are no different. Let’s talk about potential hidden costs you need to be aware of.

In this model, the customer pays only for the volume of original data they submit to a data protection solution, before compression or deduplication. On the surface, it looks very attractive, and customers mistakenly believe they can save costs substantially, because the pricing is based on the data’s original file size. In reality, this licensing model is one of the most deceptive and overcharging models in the data protection business. No wonder you will see many vendors touting this mechanism, as it, in fact, allows them to raise their profits at customer expense.

How do they do it?

Let’s take for example, two companies — let’s call them “X-Cell” and “C-Quell”. The “X-Cell” is old-fashioned and uses Microsoft Excel, and the “C-Quell” uses Microsoft SQL Server database.

Let’s also assume that both of them serve the same number of customers, and perform same number of transactions – and have the same amount of data recorded.

It would be fair to assume they should also be equal in terms of data protection, right? Not so fast.

The “X-Cell” has all the data in the XLSX spreadsheet, which is compressed data in XML format, and as a result — their “customer database” file size is small.

The “C-Quell” will be at hands of Microsoft SQL Server database file format. While it is rather efficient when it comes to storing data, it is not compressed. It also comes with indices, and most importantly – database transaction logs, which may be quite sizeable.

If these companies would use front-end backup capacity licensing model, they would be charged differently. Depending on the database settings, the “C-Quell” could pay many times more than “X-Cell” – backing up the same data.

In essence, the backup vendor overcharges “C-Quell” and other companies just because they chose a different database engine.

If they would use database engines, like Oracle, designed for performance and scalability, they could pay even more.

Maybe it is time for you to stop overpaying and switch to an easy, complete and affordable solution? With Acronis, there are no hidden surprises — the costs for “C-Quell” and “X-Cell” would be absolutely the same. Acronis does not charge for the data you back up — only for the systems you protect.

Visit Acronis website for more details or download Acronis Backup 12 trial version.