There??™s also the cost of maintaining the hardware. Is it a piece of hardware your staff
is familiar with? If not, more research and training will be involved. This may create
undue stress on your in-house hardware expert and create the risk of losing him to
another company. Hiring is a pricey and costly undertaking as well.
Another thing to consider when choosing hardware is the vendor. Notice that I
labeled the shopping process as price vs. performance vs. quality. Never leave quality out
of the equation. You can easily get high-performing hardware at bargain-basement pricing,
but how stable is the hardware? What is the company??™s support like? Worse yet, is
there an imminent risk of that company going out of business anytime soon?
Software Cost
Again, yes, there is a price tag associated with any specific software. For the purposes
of this book, I??™massuming that you have only the features of SQL Server 2005 available
(remember, plan for the worst). A number of vendors provide backup-enhancing products
or backup products designed to centralize all backup operations, from Active
Directory backups to SQL Server database backups.
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