Client portal
Tech insights
videos
When is it Time to Upgrade Your Datto Appliance?
As a general rule, there are several reasons the time has arrived to discuss Datto appliance upgrading options with a Technical Support Engineer:
- When you are experiencing failed local backups
- Continually sacrificing local backup retention to keep your system protected
- When you have limited space to virtualize the volume of your most significant agent
- When your device is utilizing 75%-85% or possibly more of its local storage from backups
Assessing the Size of the Appliance
When the engineer checks the size of the appliance, they open its Graphic User Interface to gain access to the device’s Overview page. Once inside, the Primary Storage is the information needed to begin.
Your Primary Storage will always represent the total used space. The technician then compares used space versus the entire available area, to get their calculated percentage.
- Total Protected is the current size of each partition selected for backup to the appliance. If a barrier is not selected, it does not fall under Total Protected.
- From there, every protected system gets broken down further to its space requirements.
- The amount of space occupied, from the associated recovery points, gets listed below the name of the protected system(s).
What Happens When You Don’t Have a Large Enough Datto Appliance?
When your Datto appliance space gets dramatically reduced, two common issues you should expect to happen:
- The device fills up rapidly after deployment, resulting in blocking future backups
- There is no ability to maintain local and off-site backup chains
As stated earlier, a Datto Technical Support Engineer might be able to provide temporary relief. But, the same situation will quickly return, unless you upgrade the appliance or remove machines from its protection.
What Resource Limitations Does Datto Hardware Have?
When selecting the correct hardware size, you need to be aware, Datto devices don’t just get sized for storage. When your machines, which are to be backed up to the hardware, you have to make sure the correct device’s specifications are in line with your devices.
When not done, your local virtualizations become severely affected. The reason for this is the virtualized machine will be seeking needed resources, but now they are not physically available. What happens next; high-resource programs start crashing, and virtual machines can only run slow.
For example:
Let’s assume you have a small business server known as a Single Server Environment, and your server runs all the daily operations for your entire company. Now if your server has four quad cores and 24 gigabytes of RAM, your server occupies is using an average of 220-225 GB.
If we only sized the device on storage alone, then the first response is to purchase S500 equipment to satisfy the space of the server. However, should your server go down and you must run off of the server, the resources are not available. What resources are available may not be enough to power the machine sufficiently, to allow for any operations to continue.
To guarantee, all of your device’s features function correctly; you’ll want to consider a larger device that has more space, which permits finding more resources for virtualization. By doing this, the other device operations will continue uninterrupted, which in turn provides plenty of room for backups and other base device processes.
What Should You Consider Before Datto Appliance Sizing?
When a Technical Support Engineer qualifies clients, like yourself, for a Datto appliance, they are considering your current storage needs as well as your future storage requirements. Questions you should expect to hear from a technician will be technical, and some will not.
- Are your machines workstations or servers?
- How many machines do you need to protect?
- What is each machine’s total protected size?
- Are you going to have encrypted agents?
A word about encrypted agents – They are treated as uncompressed and will take up more space.
- What are your expansion plans?
- What type of files is being backed up?
- How often will you back up your system?
- Will you be adding additional servers or workstations?
- How long would you need to run your machine from the Datto device, if virtualized?
- When restoring your files, folders, or entire operating systems, how far back do you want to go?
What Are Datto Best-Practices Recommendations?
The bullet points below gives you a Datto appliance best-practices check-list as a reminder.
- Provide ample storage for local virtualization of agents.
- All backups will start to fail as your appliance reaches full capacity.
- Confirm the device’s cloud synchronization has space available.
- Provide a slight safety buffer when unexpected data growth occurs over time.
- Store the first backup, then roll the base image to the front of the chain with each backup.
- Ample storage space, for backups, based on the Datto required retention policy.
Did you find this article informative? If you liked this one, check out these other articles we think you’ll find interesting: Considering Outsourcing IT Services (Top Questions Answered) and How Do I Find the Right IT Managed Services Provider? Or VMware Virtualization Solutions For Wilmington Companies (Information/Research)
Menark’s approach to outsourced IT services is focused on supporting the success of your organization in the same way that we foster the successes of our team. Every step in the Menark process has been developed by our team with the productivity, profit, and growth of your organization in mind.
