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John_OConnor

Have Your Backup Cake – And Eat It Too

 

“You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” With the recent holidays, and the usual proliferation of edible goodies at home, I’ve been thinking about that age-old comment on the ownership-versus-consumption dilemma. Well, that plus the fact that I spend lots of time talking with IT leaders who struggle with a non-cake-related version of a similar dilemma – the choice between owning IT infrastructure or consuming it via the cloud.

It’s a complex decision in a lot of IT areas, but especially so when it comes to backup. If anything is mission-critical, it’s backup. If you lose your data, you don’t have a business. So the owned, on-premises option is deeply attractive for many businesses. But it comes with some serious headaches. It’s hard to scale up to meet new demands quickly. You’re saddled with large upfront costs. Capacity planning is tricky and time-consuming; you have to steer between the twin risks of costly over-provisioning on the one hand and running out of storage on the other.

Backup data pain point.PNGCloud computing can address some of those challenges. But the cloud can’t completely put to rest nagging worries about data privacy, security and protection. And what if network issues shut off access to your backup data? The whole point of having solid backup capabilities and rigorous processes is to provide peace of mind that you can recover from anything. Cloud alone can’t provide that.

HPE GreenLake Backup gives you the best of both worlds – on-premises and on-demand. It’s the industry’s first on-premises consumption-based backup service. HPE GreenLake Backup provides hardware, CommVault data protection software and expertise designed to fit your organization’s specific backup needs at your location, with monthly flexible payments based on a straightforward pay-per-usage metric. You get all the assurance and control of on-prem IT, but with the flexibility and convenience of the cloud.

Here are four reasons why HPE GreenLake Backup should be on your 2018 vision list:

1. HPE GreenLake Backup is a true end-to-end solution. HPE provides the back-end storage and management servers, as well as the software and operating systems for your backup solution. And we also provide the expertise and services to make sure it’s a success. HPE Pointnext consultants can help you design the solution at the right size for your needs, implement it, and manage any data migrations.

2. It frees up resources for high-value projects. HPE GreenLake Backup provides enterprise-grade reactive and proactive support and monitoring through HPE Datacenter Care. With HPE as your single point of contact for support and management of the solution, you can free up your admins to tackle the projects that can really make a difference to your core business.

3. It hugely simplifies billing. The calculations and estimates that go into tracking cloud usage – monitoring and metering how much data you’re sending over, and how often – are often complicated and time-consuming. HPE GreenLake Backup eliminates these back-end tasks through an innovative and unique unit of measure that we call the front-end terabyte.

It’s a really straightforward concept. Let's say you have three servers. We simply take the biggest single data transfer for each one during the billing period and aggregate them. So if the first server’s largest transfer was 10 terabytes of data, the second host sent 15 tb, and the third sent 22, then you have a total of 47 front-end terabytes, and that’s what we bill you on at the end of the month. Or rather, I should say at the end of the first month … because in the next billing period we’ll do incremental billing. Let’s say the front-end terabyte total increases to 70. But obviously we don’t have to back up everything, because we already have 47 TB backed up from the previous month. So we meter and charge for the 47TB plus the incremental difference.

So this is not just cloud-like, consumption-based billing – it’s massively simplified consumption-based billing. Because you’re gauging backups on a front-end basis, you don't have to worry at all about the back end. We take care of all that.

And, of course, you eliminate any worries about overpaying as a result of the overprovisioning that often occurs with a traditional on-premises backup solution.

4. It’s really easy to scale. You won’t need to worry about running out of capacity. We design your HPE GreenLake Backup solution to include a good-sized local buffer that you can dip into as needed. But beyond that, we’re constantly monitoring your environment to manage capacity proactively. Let’s say you have a change of policy, so you’re now running backups seven days a week, instead of the five days that you originally designed for. HPE analytics can detect the change, and our consultants can validate, and if necessary recommend moving more equipment into the environment to make sure you don’t run into a shortage.

So turns out it is possible to have your on-premises backup solution and consume it, too. Pity it doesn’t work for actual cake, but I’m happy to stick with straight-out consumption on that one.

You can read more about HPE GreenLake Backup here. Or get a quick overview in this 2-minute video.

 

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About John

John has been working with HP and now Hewlett Packard Enterprise for 25 years. Although his current role is Worldwide Portfolio Business Service Manager, he has worked across the business in sales, business development, project management, delivery and most recently portfolio management. He received his Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from Lawrence Technological University, and an MBA from the University of Notre Dame.

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John_OConnor

Worldwide Portfolio Business Service Manager