I was walking through my house in the dark the other night and tripped over the Rock Band drum set and Guitars that I had stashed in the corner. After getting yelled at for still having that stuff in the house I exclaimed “Let’s just sell them!” This garnered the standard, “I don’t know…what if we wanna play Rock Band”. You mean, lug out the gear, power on the Wii, figure out which HDMI channel it’s on, Great, there’s an update ready, download, download, download, finally found the disk, game is running. Where are the controllers? Oh there they are…dang, no batteries. 15 minute charger, install the controllers back into the guitars, reconnect all of the equipment, wifi isn’t working, can’t login to my account, oh wait, now it works. Game starts, how do I play this again?
It dawned on me at that point that in order for Rock Band to properly fit into my life I was going to need to add a game room onto the house. I also need to have all of the batteries charged, and spares on standby should I need to swap them out quickly. The guitars themselves need to be maintained as well. Stickers start to fall off, straps get loose, and dust accumulates. I also need to maintain the Wii. System updates come out that need to be downloaded, and the game is always offering me the latest and greatest new songs to download…which takes time. Once I have that under control, and the space to leave the guitars in when not use, and use them when they are, I need to keep up to speed with the game itself or its no fun.
What does that have to do with backup and recovery? Well, when you need your backup, you need to know its there and ready for you. You don’t want to have to built out a whole datacenter or multiple racks just to accommodate the system. It should be small and take up minimal space and consume minimal resources. It needs to be maintained, and the more complex your backup infrastructure, the more components that need to be maintained, adding time and cost to the solution. The more parts I have in my environment, the more I need to understand how to operate. If you need Windows, NetWorker, Linux, Application, Storage, and change management knowledge to maintain this complex environment, there are more places for it to be a problem if/when it breaks.
The solution of course is to get a integrated, all in one solution like Avamar and Data Domain. Small footprint, massive capacity, simple operation, minimal maintenance. Now if I can figure out a way to dedupe all of these guitars!
Digital IRL 