Zetta.net is an award-winning provider of enterprise-grade cloud and local backup, disaster recovery, and archiving. http://www.zetta.net/
When we talk to customers who are considering an appliance-based backup approach, the initial concern they have is around the cost of the appliance, maintenance, and future upgrades.
When you buy an appliance you are making a purchase that has a fixed amount of useable disk space and hopefully you can purchase one with extra capacity for your business to grow into.
Occasionally, you will have the option to expand the usable space by purchasing higher capacity drives or filling unused drive slots, but eventually the appliance will reach its capacity. At this point, the vendor is happy to sell you the next model up with increased capacity, starting the cycle again.
This is a conversation I would imagine most IT buyers have had many times and is based around costs and capacity planning; you are spending money now to upgrade to higher capacity storage than you need with the expectation you will eventually grow into it.
However, a recent Spiceworks discussion brought up a new question to consider when looking at an appliance-based approach to backup. In addition to asking what happens to your capital expense budget when your appliance hits capacity, the other important question to ask is, “What happens to my backups when my appliance hits capacity?”
Hit Capacity? Delete
In this referenced discussion, the IT buyer had an experience where upon hitting capacity, the appliance appears to have begun automatically clearing out retention data to make space for the new backups.
That is an incredibly frightening thought if you have ever spent time managing backups for a company that simply has a business defined retention requirement, let alone a legally defined requirement.
What should the appliance do in this situation? Should it fail the current backup in order to maintain the retention of old data, possibly leaving the tip of your data set exposed? Should it protect your most recent data at the cost of wiping out the oldest data which is about to expire soon anyway?
In the situation described by the poster, it sounds like the appliance opted to create new backups at the expense of deleting old backups regardless of the defined retention policy without prompting him.
Could you imagine what would happen if that data was subject to HIPAA, SEC 17a-3 & 17a-4 or any other legally defined data retention period? What if the missing retention was uncovered during an outside audit? This is how someone can lose their job.
Scale Your Backups
As an online backup service for the SMB space, Zetta.net customers are not subject to the risks of hitting any kind of hard set storage capacity limit and having backups fail or retention data automatically deleted since our solution does not require an appliance.
Their data is maintained on dynamically allocated storage pools that grow and contract as space is needed which alleviates the capacity planning concerns of physical hardware, as well as the possibility of capacity issues causing backup problems similar to what the Spiceworks user experienced.
As a backup service provider our worst fears are all around the possibility of data loss. Through replicating customer data between our data centers and providing storage that grows as your business grows, we fortunately never have to worry about data being lost due to having capacity issues as described above.
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