Appliance-based backup has had its day

Chris Schin explains the limitations of hardware-based backup and recovery in a cloudy world

Symantec's decision to kill off its Backup Exec appliance is the latest development on the backup and recovery landscape.

Thanks to growing software sophistication, software-only cloud backup and recovery is heading towards a dominant position in the backup market. This is particularly true as SMBs baulk at investing in and supporting increasingly expensive hardware as part of their storage and backup infrastructure.

MSPs, especially those using appliances and catering to the SMB space, should consider this a cue to re-evaluate their cloud backup and recovery strategies. Despite being touted as the simple solution, appliance-based backup systems can cause management headaches for MSPs and higher than expected costs for their SMB customers.

To start off, MSPs and their clients have to outlay significant capital to cover the cost of the server appliances, and run the risk of being tied to a particular hardware vendor.

It's also often overkill – most MSP customers have between one and three servers, so adding an additional appliance just to handle backups nearly doubles their hardware footprint. For their part, MSPs can get stuck footing the bill for hardware that doesn't get used and can fast become an obsolete resource.

Keeping tabs on all appliance hardware across multiple customer sites can be a full-time job in itself, not to mention the MSP's other client tasks. Things can get hectic quickly if an MSP has multiple clients requiring regular on-site visits for routine appliance installation, management, repairs and upgrade tasks.

Beyond these administrative challenges, the appliance can also suffer from a limited shelf life. The appliance's capacity essentially caps growth. If the backup requirements exceed the capability of the hardware, the only way to scale up or down to meet customer requirements is to buy a different box.

The biggest problem is that an appliance-based offering compromises MSPs' ability to respond to customers' disaster recovery requirements.

If the appliance goes down or is damaged in a flood, fire, etc, MSPs have to wait for a replacement before they can recover a customer's data. This might postpone recovery anywhere from 24 to 72 hours. For most businesses looking to minimise downtime even under the worst circumstances, that's an unacceptable delay.

Finally, appliance-based backup is not the fastest at getting data off-site. Data is typically backed up from a source server to a backup appliance and then trickled out to the cloud, and this extra hop in the data flow creates a bottleneck that reduces performance.

And since these rely on the appliance for the primary "restore" copy, the vendors often don't optimise their offsite copy technologies.

By contrast, SaaS-based cloud backup and recovery has few if any of these limitations. So don't wait for another sign that appliance-based backup and recovery isn't sticking it out for the long haul.

Chris Schin is vice president of products at Zetta