This is a very good question … why has it not taken off in a big way ?.

Why not replicate to two places..? Is this a problem with cost… it builds up if you need to feel very secure.

Also, it is only human to do the backup locally, if you already retain an in-house infrastructure in order to operate your business.

Perhaps one needs to offer more value, at higher cost.

For example… given sufficient direct bandwidth…. a remote mirror, backed by CDP plus traditional backup, all from one remote Storage Center.

The customer is protected when his primary storage fails (continues to run off the remote mirror)… and is able to restore when the local system is back “on air”.

I remember the first time I heard SPOP, Storage Point(s) of Presence. I thought to myself, “What a great idea whose time has come”.

Are there any xSPs, other than ISPs still in business? I wonder how SOA will affect this? SOA is a big bear to handle for people who balk at the complexity of ILM?

Offshoring and Outsourcing have become common. OutStoring is still a bad word. It is not a bad idea.

Take your corporate laptop. How often is it backed up? Regularly you say. Great! Where, and in what form, is the backup stored? Tape at Iron Mountain? Local disk at the office?

Regardless of where and in what form, what is your RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) for the laptop?
It makes a big difference in the Strategy and Solution to use.

Personally, I want my 100GB of “Personal Information” restored in 1 hour, preferred, or 8 hours maximum. Assume the disk is full. That’s either 100GB or 12.5GB per hour. Sounds easy. Anybody benchmarked their laptop to see what they can get in the real world?

Consider this Strategy. I make regular backups to multiple Online Storage services. At least three. Preferably the three best. Determining that is another post. This is automatic and done while I sleep or any time I am online. CDP like.

I lose my hard drive, or worse yet I lose my laptop, everything is out there accessible by me, or my authorized agent, 24×7xforever?x or 365?
All I need is a new drive, even an external one if my laptop will boot from it, and I am off to the races.

If I am really good at Solutions then I have a local external drive with my “up-to-date” laptop image on it which is my local failover and short term Information Storage. I just boot up off the external and keep working until the new disk arrives and I have time to restore it.

That same scenario can be used from a personal laptop to the Enterprise Data Center. Only the granularity changes. Think in terms of a local SPOP for the Data Center.

Obviously, Amazon maintains a 7×24 financial transaction-based business that rivals just about anything out there. They use S3 internally. Realistically, its failure rate must be at least 100x lower than tape.

Yet none of the on-line backup solutions I’m aware of has taken off in a big way. Why? Bandwidth is one problem, of course. Yet it also seems to me that the control/security issue is primary. Not rational, and very human.

Robin

Are you saying that outsourcing data to CleverSafe/Amazon is not as bad as people make it out to be ?