Opinion

posted on 05 May 2008 22:09

The assault on tape gathers pace. Now there is another alternative to tape backup and archive being pushed by disk backup and Software-as-a-Service lovers, disk-to-cloud - we could call it D2C - and disk-to-disk-to-cloud, call it D2D2C.

The cloud is the generic name for computing resources made available across the Internet from data centres run by the likes of Amazon, Carbonite, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nirvanix, and now EMC. It's taken its Mozy consumer/SOHO cloud backup service acquisition and expanded it into MozyPro and MozyEnterprise for SMB and larger enterprises.

EMC is building out a global set of interconnected data centres; the next one to open will be in Ireland. It will enable it to offer backup services to multi-national companies. Nirvanix already has a world-wide set, including ones in Europe.

The Mozy business pitch is that you can back up your data to the cloud, EMC's Fortress infrastructure in this instance, and it offers a disaster recovery feature as well as a straight backup service. As well as your files being protected your business is protected against file data loss if an office goes down. 

So the cloud offers the same protection as taking tape cartridges off-site. It can be a powerful appeal. In effect though, Mozy is saying: 'Why bother with a local backup at all?" Just run your backups D2C style; disk-to-cloud

Why indeed? Yosemite Technologies CEO George Symons has an answer. He says that running incremental backups out across the Internet is okay. You're probably going to be sending out data that has been compressed or de-duplicated, not that many bytes at a time in other words, and trickling this out over the net is okay.

But restoring files is another matter. You don't want to send large files across the net; it will take a long time. Far better, he says, to restore from a local disk copy. Then you get fast local restoration with the cloud backup functioning as the DR copy. He says run your backups D2D2C-style; disk-to-(local)disk-to-cloud.

That sounds a good ideas as well as preserving Yosemite's backup to disk revenues. Symons says this scheme needs a transparent back end. You need just one front-end backup data capture function at a customers' site. It wouldn't be practical to have a Yosemite front-end doing the local copy and a separate and different cloud backup front-end doing the cloud copy data transfer.

What is needed is one front end responsible for both functions. Symons thinks that partnerships between existing backup to disk software suppliers and cloud backup suppliers on this basis are possible and a great idea.

For the cloud backup service providers, especially the ones with a  channel strategy, this looks to be a great idea too as they get to sell in partnership with D2D backup vendors and not against them; instant channel with upsell opportunities for both sides to make money, lovely recurring revenue money too and not one-off license sales.

EMC knows this and it is going to bring its Retrospect SMB backup product and its Mozy cloud backup service together. We can see the logic too, and it indicates to me that maybe all D2D backup suppliers ought to be exploring cloud backup partnership possibilities. If some don't their competitors will.

Some positioning needs to be worked out between replicating disk backup data to a remote office as DoubleTake does. Replicating to the cloud will need to be cheaper and offer additional functionality, file archive content management pr something like that.

The big casualty in this is tape backup. Local disk backups provide fast restores and cloud backups provide the off-site and DR capability, leaving no role for tape at all. If there are any suppliers offering tape-only backups then they really ought to be adding backup to disk capability to their products just as fast as they can, other wise they might get squeezed out of existence.

For cloud backup service providers exploring partnership possibilities with backup vendors ought to be a priority. Unless, like the UK's ThinkingSAFE, they have their own cloud backup service already integrated. D2D2C has a nice ring to it. The idea has legs and could go a long way.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}