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Asigra MSP Kishmish has written a first hand account of their experience with a customer who is still using tape.  While many of us assume that the benefits of cloud backup are obvious, there are enough businesses today still using tape to show us that we have more work to do.

Michael Varre from Kishmish says in his recent blog post:

How could a self-proclaimed cloud backup evangelist still support customers using that dirty 4-letter word? The simple answer is: it’s my fault. I blame myself for not doing a better job of properly explaining the drawbacks of doing it the old way.

Read the full post to find out how Michael Varre and Kishmish demonstrate the value of cloud backup vs tape to their customers.  This post starts what I will hope be a longer conversation on their blog around the challenges of getting customers to move out of the status quo and consider making the leap to the cloud.

How many of you are dealing with customers hesitant to move from tape?  Or are you a business using tape yourself?  Tell us your stories.

Five reasons why MSPs currently offering hosted services should be looking at this growing Cloud Backup market to move into this market.

1. On-demand Business Model – The cloud-based on-demand business model is here now – the new economic reality is that the old asset-based business model is giving way to OPEX-based approach
2. Magnification of MSPs size and scope – Cloud Computing eliminates the geographic boundaries for MSPs to target and attain potential customers and allows them to expand beyond their previously perceived geography and scope, magnifying their business expertise, thus allowing MSPs to expand their business
3. Operational Efficiencies – MSPs providing cloud backup and recovery have expertise that allow them to provide services more efficiently than in-house IT departments. Due to the economic downturn, customers are smarter about their IT strategy and are more open to entertaining IT as a Service (ITaaS) and take advantage of the cost savings, due to better operational efficiencies, offered by the MSPs.  
4. Forward Thinking MSPs – Cloud Computing elevates how MSPs think about their business. This new business model enables the MSPs to acquire new cloud-based backup and recovery skills with little effort.
5. Low or Few Barriers to Entry – Cloud Computing lowers the overall cost of entry into the market for new MSPs.

The above reasons present business opportunities for MSPs. Cloud backup enables MSPs to grow their business by winning larger customers that are farther away. It gets MSPs in the door so that you can sell more of your expanded services resulting in incremental revenue.

Cloud business model is more acceptable today because the customer problem is being exacerbated by data compliance and disaster requirements. Data protection has not kept up with the backup and recovery resulting in an increased need for more resources and human capital, which makes cloud backup and restore a much more cost effective solution. Cloud is more efficient – when the data grows, the ability to manage that data does not scale linearly with the effort to manage the data.

Beware of the price war.The IT services industry has been impacted by eroding margins on IT hardware and software and managed backup service providers are starting to feel the pinch. This is due to the ever frequent upgrades in technology, resulting in Service Providers being continually tasked with CapEx purchases to keep up with the Jones’s.  Further, increased competition due to the low barriers to entry is adding additional pressure to pricing. Unfortunately, the natural reaction of most MSPs in this situation is to lower prices to compete. This is a death trap.

To add insult to injury, clients/customers today are becoming increasingly knowledgable and demanding. They understand that all types of data don't hold the same value and are increasingly looking for solutions that allow them the flexibility to establish different backup and recoverability capabilities for different data sets.  

So how should data be valued?The true value of any data that is being backed up has to be ascertained through a 3-Dimensional view comprising of Age, Type and Size of data. For example, many clients would assert that data created within the past 30 days has a greater significance to the viability of their business and therefore has a higher value compared to data created 3-5 years ago. This may require them to demand better recoverability objectives for such data. Similarly, mission critical data such as an email mailbox of top management is far more valuable than a document prepared for internal messaging. The size of the data set also contributes to a decision as to where and how the backed up data must be stored and what RTOs and RPOs must apply.

Vendors need to arm Service Providers with the right Arsenal.The challenge in today’s Backup and Recovery landscape is in the fact that most solution providers (software companies), do not provide users the ability to reduce costs over time, thus preventing Managed Service Providers from delivering a tiered pricing structure to their clients. This results in a 1-Dimensional view of the managed backup business, eventually leading to higher costs, competition from low-end substitutes and irrelevancy.

As a managed service provider looking to get into (or already in) the managed backup services business, you need to have the ability to meet the needs of the marketplace. Today, the market demands tiered recovery solutions. And of course, in order to do so, you need to ensure that you work with vendors that allow you that flexibility, both in terms of functionality and pricing.

In it's upcoming webinar, SNIA's Cloud Storage Initiative will be introducing an exciting new Cloud Backup and Restore (Cloud BUR) Special Interest Group. This webinar is open to all and will address various cloud education and collaboration activities for end users, the channel, and vendors at the SNIA Symposium, SNIA Storage Developers Conference and CloudBurst, SNW Dallas, and SNW Europe.

I wanted to share this here with you as it's a great way to get to know SNIA and the Cloud Storage Initiative and also get involved (if you aren't already!).

You can click here to register.

Enterprises and vendors alike often focus so much on data backup that sometimes they forget about the reason that they backup the data. Customer's focus should be on data Recovery not data backup.

All vendor solutions in the marketplace backup customer data but it requires real data stewardship to ensure that the data can be restored when needed. Over our 24-year history, Asigra has developed best practices around data stewardship to ensure data restorability if the customer looses a file, disk, machine or the entire facility.

The data has to be conditioned constantly to ensure restorability. The following factors can cause data corruption:

1. Disc malfunction
2. Disc controller malfunction
3. Bad sectors on the disc
4. Filesystem corruption

Access to metadata is not sufficient because bad sector on a disc can render metadata unreadable.

Following data integrity and consistency check functionality is embedded in Asigra software to ensure, data restorability:

1. Ensuring data consistency – this process ensures that all the data components have been collected sequentially by the DS-Client (the data collector at the enterprise customer’s premises) before sending the data to the DS-System.
2. Ensuring all data has arrived offsite before storage – Asigra’s DS-System (the online data repository) writes all the data being backed up offsite to a temporary location, checks and ensures that all the data has arrived before storing it.
3. Restore validation – this is an actual restore simulation that conducts an actual data restore to a temporary location to ensure data restorability. Think of it as the data restore dry run to prepare for the actual disaster.
4. Autonomic healing – this automated process runs on the DS-System in the background, scans the entire storage to ensure data integrity. Since the data at the DS-System is encrypted, the “Autonomic Healing“ process checks links between the data blocks, compares digital signatures between different components for inconsistencies. When corrupted data is uncovered, it is marked as corrupted and a notification is sent to the DS-Client to resend the portion of that data that was marked corrupted. This ensures that the data is always recoverable in case of a disaster.
5. Backing up the DS-Client database to the DS-System – this ensures that if the DS-Client is lost it can easily be rebuilt with the appropriate backup structure.

When you're shopping for a backup solution, please inquire from your vendor to ensure that the functionality they provide will restore your data, not just during a Disaster Recovery (DR) drill but in the event of an actual disaster (accidently deleted file, damaged hard drive, machine loss or lost site).

I was recently chatting with one of my customers, Chris Cooper from Marin IT. Marin IT’s story is quite remarkable and unconventional. To give you a sense of Marin IT’s growth, the company was protecting (with their managed backup service) approximately 700GB of data in the first 3 months of operation. Since then, they’ve more than doubled their business, currently protecting 1.7 Terabytes of compressed, de-duplicated data. And they continue to grow.

I asked Chris for his take on the Managed Backup Business. 

What would you say is your secret sauce?

Chris: We are not focused on making money off our customers as soon as we walk through the door. That’s a big problem (in this business).  Everyone is focused on making a profit. Our team was sick of working in the corporate IT model. We started this business out of our Cars.  Starbucks was our office and conference center. We brought gear home and configured routers on our kitchen tables.

Today our operations run out of a comfortable business park office but we still choose not to be the hot rod big time IT shop. We evaluate what people actually need and we give them solutions they can actually afford. Today, we maintain a large, loyal customer base. Our double digit growth is driven exclusively by word of mouth.

If there’s a piece of advice that you were to give to other MSPs out there who are looking to grow their managed backup business, what would it be?

Chris: Don’t be greedy. Focus on service - focus on what your clients can manage. For example, we have a new local client that we’ve been working with…the former IT consultants were billing the client for support on a per server basis which eventually grew to a massive amount, as the client’s infrastructure grew.

We put in a blade system with VMware. After virtualizing their environment and eliminating complexity they didn’t need, we reduced their rack requirements from 6 racks down to 2 racks.

We reduced the amount of cooling, power, and network hardware as well. We know the client appreciated our efforts because we didn’t just go out there trying to sell them anything and everything. Instead we worked with them, taking on the role of a trusted advisor. This sort of a strategy works for us, because we believe in it. It’s who we are as a company.

To learn more about Marin IT, visit them at www.marinit.com

I recently came across an article that advocated tape based backup and I felt the need to respond to the blog post with one of my own. To be quite honest, I was surprised while reading this. Tape is dying, and it’s not just me saying so. Heck, most data stored on tapes can’t even be recovered in the event of a disaster, and don’t even get me started on the security risk that tapes pose to businesses. In fact, Gartner recently reported in one of its articles that 71% of tape backups tend to fail when it comes down to restore. In my opinion, backing up to tape is no longer an acceptable risk for organizations to take.

Would you want your medical records backed up to tape only to find that after a disaster and subsequent restoration, only 29% was recoverable?  I think not. 

The mistake businesses make is that they only care about backup. Who cares about backup if you can’t restore your data?  Backup is only done so that in the event that you end up losing data (if it hasn’t happened yet, it will), you can restore with confidence and get your business back on track as quickly as possible.  All tape is, is a cheap way to get a cute little checkmark in your DR Plan. 

Once upon a time, VHS movies, horse drawn wagons, and carrier pigeons were all considered trendy. Today its more about blue ray discs, hybrid/electric cars and “tweets”. Just something to ruminate about.

Thanks for reading. If you like what you’ve read, please leave me a comment. If you disagree, send your message via carrier pigeon ;-)

Agents are usually presented by the vendors as very light consumers of hardware resources (typically 2% over a 24 hour period). This resource utilization is accurate when the agents are sleeping but at peak times the resource utilization of agents can increase to 20-25% of the total system hardware resources. Additionally, a single agent adds as much as 16% server overhead to each application.

In physical server environments, there are typically 1-2 agents per physical machine. The same number of agents are required per virtual machine in a virtualized environment. Since a single physical server can be transformed into tens of virtual servers, the result is that there are lots of agents per virtual server host, taking up most, if not all, of the system resources. Moreover, at peak times the system hardware resources are oversubscribed, killing the I/O, rendering the server useless for backing up your critical data seriously impacting your RTO and RPO.

Consequently, backups will need to be scheduled serially extending the backup time windows. The bottom line is agents make data backup and restores difficult.

A virtual environment is the perfect use case for the need of agentless backup and restore – it supports a multitude of applications and platforms without the need of an agent.

Users trying to do backup and recovery should be able to install a backup and recovery solution on physical or virtual machines and have the flexibility to define a physical or virtual machine as a backup target. MSPs should be able to pre-install the client backup software on a virtual machine or a physical machine and ship it to their customers.

Additionally, users should have the flexibility to backup data at the disk level (backing up the entire virtual machine image) or at the application or file level. The ability to backup data at the application or file level enables granularity and is extremely useful when restoring data, saving wide-area bandwidth and storage costs. 

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Image Source: Flickr User: jimmyroq

The degree to which businesses rely on their data for their day-to-day operations can vary - law firms are a prime example of a business type whose data is mission critical.  Asigra service provider CoreVault provides cloud backup services to many law firms across the U.S.  They recently spoke with Jim Calloway, Director of the Management Assistance Program with the Oklahoma Bar Association.  Jim talks about how business continuity is critical for lawyers, saying "if you lose your forms, all of your digital calendar, all of your work in progress, it could quite literally put you out of business".

Jim says it's typical to hear law firms talk about having backup strategies in place, yet frequently, something comes up that prevents the backup from happening.  Does this sound familiar to you or your customers?  If you are a law firm or deliver data protection services to law firms, you may want to share this video with your peers.

As consumers of backup, we haven’t been diligent enough in the past, when deciding which software platform or backup service to adopt to meet our data protection needs. Too much attention has been paid to the act of backup and software vendors have constantly focused their attention on metrics such as backup windows. However, at the end of the day, what really matters is how quickly you can recover data while causing minimal disruption to your business.

When you start focusing on recovery, you’ll realize that you don’t need to have the same Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) or Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for all your data. That is, older data can have more relaxed recovery objectives or Service Level Agreements (SLAs) compared to younger, more critical data. Most companies need to have access to (and recover in case of data loss) older data for compliance purposes. Due to different RPOs and RTOs based on the age of the data, customers should demand tiered recovery solutions from their Managed Service Providers (MSPs).

In fact, Gartner, in its research document entitled, New Storage Solutions Can Modernize Data Life Cycle Management (published: 24 February 2010), recommends organizations to “Focus data availability requirements on recovery capabilities, versus meeting the backup window, and build solutions that have the fastest and most cost-effective recovery capabilities.”

In what way can tiered recovery help an organization?

Apart from the obvious, i.e. allowing you to meet quicker RPOs for more critical data, tiered recovery helps align the value of data with the cost of protecting it. It helps stretch your backup budget and makes data protection and recovery a lot more efficient.

Consider a simple example. Your corporate mandate might require you to recover data, up to 7 days old, much quicker than data that’s between 7 and 90 days. Further, you might have more flexible and lax objectives with data that’s more than 3 months old. In such a case, you could utilize a local storage option for your youngest data, allowing you to recover at LAN speeds. You could then send data, that’s between 7 and 90 days old, to an offsite location over the WAN and data that’s older than 90 days, to a different location where it resides on cheaper media and meets longer RPOs. The net result of such a strategy – you not only have access to recover mission critical data quickly, but you’re also able to improve the efficiency of your backups, cut costs, while still meeting your disaster recovery objectives. 

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Image Source: Flickr User: iliveisl