Chief Technology Officer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Reseller
2020-09-06T08:04:39Z
Sep 6, 2020
The cost is based on capacity. You have got a hardware component because you have got to buy nodes and you have got to buy discs for those nodes. That is typical server pricing cost whether you are buying Cisco systems or HP or whatever, you are buying two new rackmount boxes full of discs. If I am looking at comparing to the competition — let's say we compare Beam to Cohesity. Beam makes their solution look extremely inexpensive because they just say they are selling the software. You run the solution as a virtual machine. The idea is that they suggest you do not need anything else in the way of dedicated hardware. But in actuality, Beam still needs a lot of compute power to perform — especially if you need compression and encryption and stuff like that. So Beam makes it sound like it has some advantages because of the way it is deployed, but any backup product needs a lot of horsepower. Their claims end up not being the reality. When you factor the claims for not needing hardware in, then you have to try to compare apples-to-apples. Beam just really does not have an immutable storage capability because they do not manage their storage. From an attack footprint, Beam runs on top of Windows. So its attack surface is pretty large. When I run Beam, I have a dependency on the SQL server. Those are all things that we looked at and realized we might not want to have those risks. We had to look at the risk and decide if it was high enough to say that Beam was not an option. That was kind of a deciding factor because we did not want our backup platform to be the same platform that is our largest attack surface in terms of our app servers and all the Windows servers out there. Right now what we are seeing in the industry is the hackers are going after the backup systems first. If they get that, then they go take out the production data, and you are done. That fact makes mutable storage absolutely critical to us. The obvious solution to the problem was not having the platform be Windows-based as it was hugely important to security.
Regarding pricing, it's very costly and I rate it a four.
The cost is based on capacity. You have got a hardware component because you have got to buy nodes and you have got to buy discs for those nodes. That is typical server pricing cost whether you are buying Cisco systems or HP or whatever, you are buying two new rackmount boxes full of discs. If I am looking at comparing to the competition — let's say we compare Beam to Cohesity. Beam makes their solution look extremely inexpensive because they just say they are selling the software. You run the solution as a virtual machine. The idea is that they suggest you do not need anything else in the way of dedicated hardware. But in actuality, Beam still needs a lot of compute power to perform — especially if you need compression and encryption and stuff like that. So Beam makes it sound like it has some advantages because of the way it is deployed, but any backup product needs a lot of horsepower. Their claims end up not being the reality. When you factor the claims for not needing hardware in, then you have to try to compare apples-to-apples. Beam just really does not have an immutable storage capability because they do not manage their storage. From an attack footprint, Beam runs on top of Windows. So its attack surface is pretty large. When I run Beam, I have a dependency on the SQL server. Those are all things that we looked at and realized we might not want to have those risks. We had to look at the risk and decide if it was high enough to say that Beam was not an option. That was kind of a deciding factor because we did not want our backup platform to be the same platform that is our largest attack surface in terms of our app servers and all the Windows servers out there. Right now what we are seeing in the industry is the hackers are going after the backup systems first. If they get that, then they go take out the production data, and you are done. That fact makes mutable storage absolutely critical to us. The obvious solution to the problem was not having the platform be Windows-based as it was hugely important to security.
Compare and choose wisely by considering initial 7 operational costs. And require less FTEas compared to other legacy vendors.