Getting your Exchange 2007 project approved – Part 2 (Make your backups more cost effective…)

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The boss is tightening the purse strings and you're having trouble justifying an Exchange 2007 upgrade?  One area it’s worth focusing on is backups.  ..but I wouldn’t tackle backups on their own – I would tackle them in conjunction with your overall plans for compliance and availability.  I’ve added some links to some blogs at the end of this article which might help in this approach.

In theory backups is actually an area where it should be very easy to save money but it is often difficult to get agreement to make the changes necessary to make the real cost savings.  What Exchange Server 2007 does is give us more options about what to do with backups.  With more copies of our data (CCR-CCR->SCR) we are less dependent on our backups for data recovery in the event of failure.  Have a read of this blog for a bit more detail about why you actually need to backup: Do we actually need to backup our Exchange data anymore?  For most companies it may not be possible to eliminate backups altogether but it should be possible to dramatically reduce the cost of the backup infrastructure that is required.

We are seeing far more deployments of VSS, ‘disk to disk’ based backups which retain data only for the short term with no long term data retention by a backup solution.  This will be a dramatic cost saving in terms of a reduction in the number of tapes required by your IT department, and the costs associated with the handling and storing of those tapes.  Even if your company does need to retain some long term data retention on tape you should be able to dramatically reduce the number of tapes you use by using using short term disk based backups and less frequent backups to tape. (You might even consider long term data retention into the cloud?)

Of course it does mean you need to purchase a product like DPM to manage the short term backup rotation, but my experience is that the cost of the servers, storage and licenses (DPM 2007 SP1 -- Licensing) to support DPM is pretty cost effective.  Critically DPM is also a pretty simple solution to deploy and manage and so in my opinion supportability need not be a major concern.

The key here is obviously being able to estimate the cost saving of a reduction in tapes and perhaps the replacement of the solution you were using for your Exchange 2003 streaming backups.  Here are some ideas of the costs you should collate:

  • How many tapes do I user per month now and how many would I use if I went with a short term data retention policy on disk?  Over a year this could be pretty significant.
  • How much does it cost to transport and store these tapes offsite?  What is the cost if I reduce the number of tapes that need to be handled?
  • How long is before your tape devices or libraries are going to need to be refreshed? If it is soon then you may save your department money by them not having to protect Exchange data to tape.
  • If you don’t backup to tape are there any costs to be saved in software licenses?
  • ..and for comparison – how much will my DPM licenses and DPM servers and storage cost?

Getting shot of tape backups altogether is where you may see the real savings and as I say this may be a step too far but it’s worth running through what compliance requirements or industry regulations you are attempting to meet by long term protection and if this can be done more effectively…

..and some links to understanding how to work through designing for recoverability:

Recovery Scenarios for E2K7…..I, Recovery Scenarios for E2K7…..II and Recovery Scenarios for E2K7…..III

I’d welcome your thoughts or comments if you’ve been able to prove cost savings around backups and Exchange Server 2007…