The first tax deduction you’ll receive when you purchase PowerFile is the elimination of backup for every terabyte written to our systems. These savings can be huge when you consider the amount of additional cash required to buy backup hardware, software, and media every time you purchase a new terabyte of disk.

To get a clearer picture, let’s walk through a simple example. Say you employ a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) scenario with VTL and LTO-4. You perform weekly full backups and daily incremental backups to the VTL system where they are cached for 4 weeks in order to meet your backup/restore service levels. After 4 weeks, the latest full backup is written off to tape and sent to an offsite vault. Assume incremental backups are 5% of full backup capacity and you do 6 per week. You’re  also employing deduplication with a 10:1 data reduction rate.

 Now say that you want to add 10TB of disk to your environment. Since you will also need to expand your backup system to account for the added capacity, your total cost function will resemble the following:

$/GB = Disk + VTL + Tape + Backup SW

Let’s add some numbers to this function.

Disk. Assume you pay $2 per GB for disk.

VTL. Since full and incremental backups are cached for 4 weeks, you’ll need 5.2TB of additional VTL capacity (40TB for fulls, 12TB for incrementals, divided by 10 for dedupe). After dedupe, you pay $0.90 per GB for VTL.

Tape. Since every 4 weeks you write a full backup to tape and send it offsite, you’ll need a total of 130 LTO-4 tapes for the next year. You pay $69.99 each for LTO-4 tapes.

Backup Software. You pay $0.80 per GB to expand your license.

Based on these figures, the price of disk on your quote is $20,000 for 10TB; but once you add in the backup storage tax, your total cost will actually be $83,900.

$/GB = $2.00 + $4.68 + +$0.91 + $0.80 = $8.39

If you subtract the $2.00 per GB that you pay to acquire disk, you are still left with $6.39 in storage taxes. This is not a trivial number; especially considering that, most likely, more than half of your data being stored on disk is not changing and therefore does not need to be backed up.

Why are PowerFile Systems Backup Tax Free?

Reason #1: We Store “Archive” Data

PowerFile is a specialized storage tier. We have specifically designed our systems to identify, migrate, and store data you have deemed “archiveable”. Most refer to this data type as “fixed”, or “persistent” data. Since this data, by definition, is not changing, it does not need to be continually backed up for the purpose of timely restores.

But this still leaves us with the issue of data protection for disaster recovery purposes – discussed below.

Reason #2: We Provide Industry-Leading Data Protection

A secondary reason for performing backups is to preserve and protect data by creating secondary (or tertiary) copies. This process has become commonly known as “data protection”. PowerFile has gone to great lengths to ensure unprecedented data protection. We employ various strategies to make data preservation easy and effective.

1. Durable Media. Our systems are built upon the longevity and durability of archive-grade Blu-ray Disc. The media has a shelf-life of 50+ years and employs a specialized polyurethane coating to that prevents degradation and spatial damages.
2. Data Integrity. We have equipped all of our appliances with our patented Extended Verification And Self-healing Technology (EVAST™) data integrity scheme. This technology improves upon the basic Blu-ray disc error correction to deliver reliability that is 100x better than dual-parity RAID 6.
3. Flexible Disaster Recovery. Whether you want to replicate over a WAN via Touchless DR™ or create a copy locally and export the discs, PowerFile can accommodate a wide range of disaster recovery scenarios.

By migrating, storing, and protecting data that isn’t changing, we’re able to eliminate the backup for our tier. But you’ll also see benefits on your primary storage tier. By offloading the massive quantities of fixed content that are currently burdening your disk systems, your backup performance will increase, reliability will be drastically improved, and your admins will once again be able to enjoy their weekends.  

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 11:29 am and is filed under Storage Tax. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.