Perhaps. An important commodity for most organizations without a doubt. Commodity suggests cheap, but in the case of backup that isn’t necessarily so. Let’s not confuse cheap and commodity. Backup as a commodity suggests that the problem has been solved many times before and therefore most companies would do well to avoid recreating the wheel as it were! Focus your resources on strategic goals and treat backup as a commodity-oriented tactic. Place the appropriate value on backup as a tactic and move on.
Finding a vendor that can help you make backup a commodity in your shop is the goal. The vendor would be able to quickly implement and help you solve your backup, archive and DR problems once and for all. After all, backup isn’t really complicated. The dialog goes something like this: “Here, hang on to a copy of this important information so in case I mess my copy up, I can get a fresh copy back.” Realistically we can then read into that simple statement all the things we know to be true: we can mess up a little thing (a single file), we can mess up the whole thing (the whole server or application) and the place where the thing is stored could be gone (the whole data center).
Fundamentally, though, the process of storing a copy of stuff and being able to get it back under all circumstances is fairly straight forward. That’s why this is a commodity! Treat it like a commodity.
Define the likely scenarios that could result in you losing your stuff and describe how quickly you would want your stuff back after each of these scenarios and you’ve done all you need to do to define your backup/restore environment. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
It’s up to your backup appliance vendor to help you build a system that meets all of your needs. An appliance vendor has already seen any scenario you might have. They’ve also helped many other customers solve that exact scenario. Let them help you solve it too. You shouldn’t be trying to select the pieces necessary from the thousands of alternatives. You have better things to do! Let your tactics become commodities.
