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Continual uptime and round-the-clock service are at the heart of many businesses' philosophies. After you have the customer up on a mission-critical, 24x7 database, you better have a backup plan. Otherwise, you'll have backed yourself and your customer into a corner.
Selling a backup system for a database that can't stop for backup isn't easy, but it represents an increasing segment of a critical market need and a profitable one at that-if you can guide your customer through the maze of decisions that have to be made, that is. A hot backup system isn't inexpensive, and it isn't off-the-shelf. It usually requires a months-long sales cycle while the VAR works closely with the client to refine the requirements and develop a solution.
Phase I: Examine the Environment
So what's the first thing the VAR should do when the customer asks for a hot backup system? "Try to talk him out of it," quips one experienced VAR. But he's only half-joking. VARs who have installed mission-critical, no-time-for-downtime backup systems generally agree that they are more time, more trouble and more money than offline systems. And there are often hidden costs. For example, database performance will slow significantly-usually between 10 and 25 percent-while the backup is under way. Often, the customer needs an oversized server to maintain acceptable performance while the backup is going on.
"Make sure the client understands what it will cost to achieve this 24x7," says Dewey Allen, director of advanced software engineering centers, United States and Europe, for Price-Waterhouse LLC, a high-end VAR headquartered in Bethesda, Md. "Do you really have a business need? Can you tie that back to the business' requirements?"
From the VAR's perspective, one of the hidden costs of a hot backup system is the long sales cycle and the iterative nature of the solution. Typically, it takes between six and 18 months to complete the sale of such a backup system, and the bigger the system, the longer the cycle. In that period, the configuration of the proposed system is likely to change repeatedly as the requirements go through a process of redefinition. So the system you start out proposing is seldom the system you actually sell the customer. If the customer's needs can be met with...