Understanding Capacity in a Backup Solution

A Backup Article Contributed by M. Larose

Understanding Capacity in a Backup Solution

Capacity and capacity planning in a backup solution plays a remarkably important role. Taken from Merriam-Webster, the online edition, capacity can mean "the potential or suitability for holding, storing, or accommodating" and "the maximum amount or number that can be contained or accommodated." When one considers the growth of data within an enterprise and the fact that it grows daily worldwide, one can then see the role of capacity in a backup solution.

In fact, there are people who are trained and work as capacity planners within IT. There jobs are critical in the efficient backup and recovery of important data and you will find them in every data center around the world.

Capacity in a Backup Solution

Reliability in a backup solution is a requirement gaining greater and greater importance. Government and industry mandate to retain certain data for a stated period of time now require many businesses to review and update and in some cases trash and recreate their backup solution of choice. In many cases, this mandated time period grows longer as the data volume increases dramatically.

In addition, many companies have realized the resource they have in the data they collect, often mining it for trends and new directions that can place them in better revenue positions. How do you make competent and reliable decisions about a backup solution?

Capacity Issues in a Backup Solution

Poor performance is often the result of poor planning and unrealistic expectations. In order to accommodate good planning practices and incorporate the right level of expectation, the time and ability to configure a data center properly and to train the personnel expected to follow that solution must be include in the backup plan process. Because of complex configurations and installations the margin of error is high and truly unavoidable in some ways.

Because of the myriad of hardware and software required traffic jams are dealt with as a matter of course. In fact, one of the issues a capacity planner will deal with the most is choosing between the lesser of two evils when it comes to those traffic jams. Capacity planning deals with the art and science of a final outcome and the process is neither art nor science but a blend of the two.

The main objective is to choose the hardware and the software necessary to get the job done right. To do so, the planner must determine the volume of the data that needs to be managed. In doing so she must know the availability of the data, how the data is used and ultimately "spread out" over the center and the network, and finally the expectations for the backup and the data by asking what policies are in place for the use of the data.

Backup Solution Requirements

The end result the capacity planner is looking for the efficient backup and recovery of the data. This happens by increasing the speed of the backup solution and reducing the daily intrusion on the company operations.