Hidden Costs of Backup: Integrated Hardware Appliances

We are all too familiar with the concept of hidden costs. You work with a supplier and/or vendor, and it looks like their published pricing matches your budget – and everything goes well.

You implement the system, and it works – at first. Then you realize there are limitations, and you have to spend more than you originally budgeted. Your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) has just risen to a very different figure than you expected.

What happened? Well, there were unseen fees, solution shortcomings, charges or the licensing models that you did not take into account. The list goes on.

This is the first in a series of Acronis blogs that will talk about potential hidden costs you need to be aware of when implementing backup solutions.

Using an appliance is one of the fastest ways of implementing backup or even multi-faceted data protection in your organization. You get hardware, software, and sometimes even services, in one nicely packaged deal.

The installation is simple, the configuration is usually wizard-driven, and after what’s usually quite an easy process, your backup works. Done!

Or is it? Have you ever heard an expression: “It’s too good to be true?”

In the case of backup appliances, unfortunately, this expression applies more than ever – and the main catch is scalability.

Your IT infrastructure, as well as your business, is dynamic. Your business grows, your data volumes increase, and your IT infrastructure expands. The software part of your backup solution can easily scale, but the hardware appliance cannot. You will continue to be limited by the same capacity – be it 1TB or even 10TB you got initially.

So, what are your options?

You can upgrade the backup appliance, which would significantly increase costs (by a factor of 2x or more), and require time for migration, reconfiguration, and management.

Or, you can implement another appliance, which would also significantly increase costs (again by 2x or more), and require time for migration, reconfiguration and management time, as well as increasing complexity. Your IT team now needs to manage two appliances instead of one, losing any central management capability completely or partially.

While you may be attracted by the simplicity of backing up to integrated appliances, you will not get scalability and flexibility, and in the long term, it may cost you more. Modern backup software can easily scale and the meet demands of your growing business, including expanding to simple backup storage, like NAS, as an affordable solution.

If you’d like to learn more, see how today’s modern backup solutions prevent you from getting locked into any artificial capacity limits – check out Acronis Backup Advanced. There are no storage limits, an nd you can use any existing or new disk or tape for storage – any capacity and any combination. The solution even includes deduplication.

Eliminate the risk risking of hitting capacity limits and switch to an easy, complete and affordable solution. Visit Acronis for more details or to download a trial version today.