Tag Archive for Backup

Anthony Spiteri | 02/11/2013
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Online Storage Wars – What’s in it for Service Providers?

Last weekend I signed up for an account at MEGA. This is @KimDotCom‘s new venture attempting to send a big F-U to the regulatory forces that are accusing him of copyright infringement and extradition to the US (for more info, head to the Wikipedia page) …off the bat you get a free 50GB account to basically so whatever you want with. This Cloud Service is hosted out of NZ and they have very aggressive Pro Plans for those game enough to use a service that is in BETA. 2TB for $19 Euro’s and 4TB for $29 Euro’s.

This is where I took a step back and wondered how the hell to traditional service providers even attempt to compete with massive quota’s driven by the public cloud. Data Sovereignty aside, it’s human nature to get most bang for the buck, so when someone see’s 4TB for $29 (that’s about .007 cents per GB) vs a more traditional Australian Service Provider price of roughly 20c per GB you can start to get a sense of the uphill struggle SP’s face to offer a competitive service.

Now, it’s debatable as to the level of redundancy, resiliency, security and… most importantly backup cloud storage providers like MEGA or DropBox offer and build into their offerings and we all know the the issues DropBox has had over the past year with data loss and security. I did recently learn that Amazon Web Services S3 Storage Platform is rated at 11 9′s of availability! That’s 99.999999999 which is madness! But the reality is AWS can build those platforms at such large scales…that it blows away anything Service Providers can deliver from an availability perspective.

The reality is that Service Providers can’t simply be so misplaced/arrogant to assume that potential clients are not well informed of the relative pro’s and cons anymore. Up until the last 6 or so months…I freely put my hand up and acknowledge that I was of that belief.

So, how do we evolve and use these services for our advantage?

Hybrid Solutions = Value Added Differential

Just as enterprise and SMB’s are heading into a world of Hybrid cloud solutions, so can Service Providers look at offering Hybrid services utilizing the investment made into their own platforms. By designing more robust platforms that extend to public storage providers SP’s can start to add value to already strong services and differentiate between other providers.

As a quick example: Veeam are about to release a Cloud Edition of their very robust and reliable Backup and Replication Product. The addition of the ability to add public (or local) cloud storage to a backup job means that SP’s can offer VCaaS type offerings where clients get the best of both local, service provider and then public cloud storage and archive for their backup sets. The benefit here is that because it costs less to store data in the public cloud, you could use the public storage for long term or extreme DR scenarios while keeping the more pertinent offsite storage on the service providers end for closer/faster access to recovery points.

For the Service Providers, the idea is to generate a source of recurring income via the volume clients send to the public cloud and, also look at building in consultancy services to compliment specific design/builds for clients that require a not so out of the box solution…

In this SP’s need to be able to adapt and use the public providers to enhance their own solutions…it’s the only way the war can be won!

Category: Backup, General, Veeam | Tags: , , ,
Anthony Spiteri | 06/25/2012
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The Backup Delusion – Part 2

It’s been a while since my first post on this topic, but there has certainly been a lot of thought and effort put into this subject since then. At first I envisaged this to be a two part post, but I think I’m going to break this up over a couple more posts, that focus on a couple particular area’s that have come to the fore since i’ve begun to seriously think about backups as a hosting provider.

I’ve been running an internal product group that’s tasked with trying to find, test and launch the best overall Backup Application for our diverse client base. As a group we have gone through a process of trying to work out what features and benefits are most important to both us, as a business, and what’s important from a client’s perspective.

We spent some time working on a Backup Selection Matrix that could quantify and rate those features and from there, we would be able to score any Backup Product based on those numbers. In the previous post I listed out some of those features and explained how they effect they way in which, both clients and us as providers look at selecting, developing and deploying products. At the end of that process we where able to clearly graph products against an X and Y axis (as shown below) and from that, clearly get an indication on which products came out on top based on those requirements.

At the sake of not embarrassing some Backup vendor’s I’ve removed the product names from the images above. Suffice to say that some large, well known vendor products fell well short of expectation and rated very poorly. Across the board it was clear that not one product stood out…but some certainly failed and scored poorly.

What it’s allowed the group to do is to quantify against the testing, staging and real world UAT sites which in theory should lead to a calculated decision to be made on which product best fits the requirements.

In the next post in the series i’ll explain why, in some countries such as Australia where high speed broadband is not as widely available as in other countries, we have a fundamental issue with offsite backup technologies which basically cause most large offsite replication and backup jobs to fail…which ultimately renders the offsite backup solution useless…and that effectively puts service providers at risk of credibility issues if expectations are not set based on real world metrics.

The Backup Delusion – Part 1

Category: Backup, General | Tags: ,
Anthony Spiteri | 05/06/2012
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The Backup Delusion – Part 1

I’ll put this right out there! I would rather live in a world without Backup and Recovery. I have burnt countless hours and hair follicles working my way through and trying to tame backup application platforms. Unfortunately we have not reached a point whereby the technology we use is reliable and resilient enough to prevent failures…and with that we backup…and sometimes we recover.

Historically companies and service providers have relied on tape backups to protect their mission critical data, but with the advent of the digital age and to a lesser extent virtualization we find ourselves in an opposing world of increasing resource density and efficiency and “Big Data”. Tape drives, while still in use by some have given way to disk based backup systems and applications have failed to keep pace with the change.

I’ve had the misfortune of dealing with a large number of backup applications over the past couple of years and very few, if any have lived up to expectation. From poor Application Support (sometimes waiting a year to support a new platform after release) to products that staggeringly can’t recover data it claims to have backed up successfully. The amount of man hours I see being burnt by onsite techs and senior engineers on backend and client side issues is mind boggling. I would be very interested to see the $$ value Backup applications suck out of service providers and businesses alone! The amount of times I’ve heard a tech or sales person try to explain to a customer that, while we had the backup, and it appeared to be working, we couldn’t recover your data…sorry about that!

And as I currently try to truncate 500GB worth of Exchange Server logs (on a Virtual Server that had a 300GB SnapShot go out of control and consume all datastore space, resulting in VM failure) due to a new version of a product that previously performed the function, but now does not until a future patch, I ponder…what makes a good backup application? I’m also wondering if traditional backup applications are the way to go? Do we still need to provide an “application”? Does that application need to cover all requirements?

Traditionally a backup Application needed to cover the following:

-    Agent Compatibility/Deployment

-    Application Awareness via API/VSS

-    File Level Backup Options

-    Bare Metal Recovery of Physical Servers

Throw Virtualization into the mix and you need to cover the following:

-    Agentless Backup Options

-    Multi-Platform Support (?)

-    Change Block Tracking

-    Offsite Backup Options

Now throw in Operational Requirements and Expectations to cover the following:

-    Cost of licensing Application and vendor royalties

-    Cost of backend storage and ongoing costs of data sprawl

-    Requirement for storage efficiencies through enhanced compression and de-dupe

-    Proven stability and scalability

-    Minimal Engineering and ongoing Management time

And lastly, throw in business/client expectations to cover the following:

-    Relative value for money – I want the world, but don’t want to pay for it.

-    100% Faith in Product being delivered – You said it would work!

-    Fast Backup and Recover Times – I need that file from 18 months ago now!

-    Expectation that Application backups up everything – This is my DR right?

-    Offsite Backup Options – To the Cloud! It’s safer up there I hear?

Ok, so I might have listed out some pent up frustration drawn from client interactions for that last part…but the question remains…is there a product that ticks all those boxes? And while vendors will have you believe the marketing FUD, I have yet to find a product that does…and I would argue that no product will ever meet all requirements. We are about to enter the post PC era, and while debatable in some (Redmond) circles the truth is that we have seen the landscape of data and how it’s stored and accessed shift …and with that current backup applications and the platforms they sit upon simply can’t cope with the change.

So what do we have at our disposals to cope with this change? What vendor will release that ‘Silver Bullet’ application that solves all our issues? I don’t believe there will ever be one application that covers all bases…but there are certainly new applications and technologies that backup and control data which are emerging or are close to release. In Part 2 I’ll go through these and try to (not solve) work through what would be suitable for the foreseeable future in data backup and recovery…and introduce the often misinterpreted concept of DRaaS.

The Backup Delusion – Part 2

Category: Backup, General | Tags: , ,