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Backup Cost Exercise
In-class SA finance questions, assuming you have the following tape drive: *Quantum SDLT 320 *Can back up 115G per hour *Can store 320G on a single cartridge (compressed) *List price roughly $3000 Assume your environment is as follows: -100 desktops, each with a 40G hard drive -2 file servers with 1T each -1 web server with 200G -1 database server with 200G Answer the following questions: - Assuming you back up everything, how long would it take to do a full backup? - Assume the CEO comes to you and says that full backups must be taken every day. -How would you go about providing him a cost of backup hardware (using the SDLT 320)? - Assume that a restore takes 5 times as long as a backup. If the CEO asks you about using the backup tapes as a disaster recovery mechanism, how would you assemble a time-table of restoration? -Develop a reasonable backup schedule, and explain why you think is it reasonable. -Express your backup architecture as a ratio against the baseline IT budget for your company (assume 2 SAs @ 50K each, 1 operator @ 20K, and choose reasonable costs for the systems outlined above). -Present an IT budget, complete with SUM pie chart. Include price information on Veritas NetBackup software in your budget. -The final part of your budget should be a cost comparison of running a completely free software shop versus a commercial software office.
The answers to all of the questions are all based on simple integer math. Crank up a spreadsheet and get started. For example, multiply the number of desktops times the number of GB given for each desktop, add the GB for the servers, and you have a total number of GB that must be backed up. They want nightly backups and you have been told how fast the tape backups are. Divide the total number of GB by the GB backup rate and that will give you the total number of hours it would take for 1 backup system to do all the backups. Assuming that it's OK to use all 24 hours to do backups (I wouldn't make that assumption though... I'd use 8 hours), divide that total hours to do the backups by 24 (again, you might want to use 8 hours here... I'd present both options as worst and best cases) and that will tell you the number of backup systems to purchase. The rest is all simple math, as well. You know how to make a budget for your personal expenditures by month and year, right? It's no different here. This is actually a pretty interesting exercise because it's going to also require you to do Yabingooglehoos to find the price of the individual tapes, the price of the Veritas software, and to think about how to rotate the tapes through a daily, weekly, and monthly rotation schedules to help keep the costs down. Better get started because this sounds like either homework or a take-home exam for school of some sort. The instructor has already taught you all the things you need to know to solve this. If you want to pass the course, you need to put your shoulder to the wheel because the last thing in the world that we need is another person that thinks they're a DBA but can't actually do the job. ;)
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