There’s a lot of talk about tracking data growth by watching SAN and NAS usage, counting allocated storage by the gigabyte, etc., but I’ve always thought that backup and recovery systems offered an elegant way of closely monitoring data growth within an environment.
Recently I was asked to contribute some articles about how backup and recovery can help to improve IT processes and performance within an organisation, and the first thing that occurred to me was to write about this very topic.
If you’re worried about tracking and trending data growth within your environment, and want to see some simple examples of how to account for peaks and troughs in backup capacity while still predicting data growth, please head over to “Using Backup and Recovery to Track and Forecast Data Growth” at IT Performance Improvement.
Well, backups are great for many reasons when it comes to prediction and analysis.
However, I think this article is not telling the whole story. You need to also consider:
* compression
* database holeys
* skips
* backup failures
* etc…
However, you’ll get an idea on average growth in atleast, most situations…
All these are good points, I agree – but we shouldn’t assume that backup failures should register a major blip and in general we’ll still be able to get accurate data growth figures for those items backed up by analysing the backup sizes.
(BTW, I would sugest that compression will only play a factor if pre-backup compression is done (rare in a lot of backup environments)