Online Backup Services - What's Next?

Earlier this month, Jeremiah and I were having debate about prospects of online data storage. At that time, I invited people who may be involved in online data storage services to contact me. I am continuing to receive responses from various industry professionals on this topic.

One of the person responded was Damien Stevens, CEO of Servosity, an On Demand Backup company. Using emails and phone call, we are having a great conversation around online backup services, where it is today and where it needs to be. In my usual direct manner, I started with a very specific question in an email.

AG: How is your approach unique compare to other online backup companies?

DS: Right now we're winning customers over the competition because we've made it easier to understand, we don't charge for backup agents or extra computers, and we are not overpriced like some of the higher end competition (redacted name of competitors).

In last four years, I have heard the same pitch combining ease of use and cost too many times from online backup providers and, I have seen dozens of them come and go in the same time frame. So I wasn't very excited.

Then, he piqued my interest wanting to discuss the technologies that may enhance the value of online backup services. The demand for these technologies is not something that can be delivered on overnight. Customers are not asking the benefits of these technologies right away either. But if customers were to ask for them in 12 - 24 months, it needs to go on the service/product development roadmap soon.

Since then, our conversation has been very lively and wide-ranging. The discussions revolved around potential customer requirements of versioning, lowering network bandwidth utilization, making restores easier, and better backup/restore job management. We also discussed wide variety of technologies like CDP, data de-duplication, snapshots, replication, archiving, monitoring and management.

In the end, I decided to leverage the power of blog by writing this post and putting forward questions to my readers.

What is your opinion and experience with online backup services?

As a customer and user, what would you like to see in an online backup solution in next 12 - 24 months?

As a service provider, storage vendor, or someone familiar with various storage technologies, what technology would you recommend to be included within next 12 - 24 months?

BTW, if you have any experiences with Servosity On Deman Backup service, I would like to hear about them.

Bloggers are like sheep herd

I was absent from blogosphere for past two weeks, not intentionally. Blogging took a back seat while I managed few other projects in my life.

At work, by pure chance, I landed up performing the first field installation of new data de-duplication product. The pressure to not screw-up was great considering the high visibility internally. At home, I made a move from Eastside to Seattle that disrupted blogging routine. Also, as I am settling down in Northwest, moonlighting opportunities are growing resulting in thoughts about resurrecting a moonlighting venture.

Blogosphere hasn't been very exciting either. Most blog posts are starting to look very similar and repetitive. Everyone seems to hop on to latest news. Most posts are nothing more than hashed, rehashed or paraphrased versions of original story. It was amusing to see the coverage, blogger after blogger gave to Intel 45nm processor and the YouTube announcement of paying content creators.

Another annoying trend is promotion of audio and video podcasts through blog posts. I rarely listen or watch podcasts. Why? Because it takes too long to figure out quality and relevancy of podcast compared to scanning a text post in few seconds. And, more often than not, podcasts are nothing more than someone droning on and on about nothing .... It wouldn't be a bad idea for audio and video bloggers to start posting transcripts.

I am subscribed to almost 200 blog feeds through Google Reader. Still, there seems to be lack of original and quality content to read on blogs. Finally, I started axing the blog feeds that didn't have enough original content and thoughts put in to the posts. Quality is trumpeting over quantity in deciding who stays.

Old fashioned print publications and broadcasters seem to be offering better quality content like Z-RAM coverage in IEEE Spectrum. There may be a business opportunity for print publications or another startup, read all bloggers opinions on an issue or news, distill, summarize and print them.

Bloggers are expressing more and more what corporate marketing and public relations groups are feeding them than speaking their own mind and opinions. Bloggers are acting like sheep herd instead of sheep dogs.

Two Myths about iSCSI Adoption

… Continuation of my opinion from previous post to the expanding iSCSI debate in the storage blogosphere.

Check out opinions of Tony Asaro and Steve Duplessie on debate between Dave Hitz & Chuck Hollis. Beth Pariseau also wrote a nice summary of the debate. Chris Evans is taking on in-depth investigation of iSCSI. I am looking forward to reading about his experiments and analysis.

Since my last post, I received few emails and phone calls with skepticism, typically bestowed on me, after writing an opinion that doesn’t align with storage people with fancy titles and so-called experts. Without going into specific details, I worked with iSCSI time-to-time for over six years in variety of roles on variety of iSCSI projects.

And, if you are just starting to understand the issues with iSCSI adoption explained in Chuck’s post, you have lot to catch up.

Controversial Myths

Chuck expressed some good thoughts about the future trends and driving factors for iSCSI adoption.

In my experience, some of the driving factors may be just red herrings. These are the myths that originate from wishful thinking of people promoting iSCSI instead of realities of the iSCSI adoption impediments in customer environment.

First, I think you’ll see more of the same: iSCSI in smaller, greenfield SAN builds where FC isn’t entrenched yet. But from small acorns mighty oak trees grow.

Myth #1 The smaller greenfield iSCSI environment will grow without any challenge.

This myth is created when people take the “switching costs can outweigh any benefit of a new technology” lesson too literally. They forget that as long as a technology is not fully entrenched, it is not very difficult to get people to switch. And that is the challenge for smaller Greenfield iSCSI installs. They are not fully entrenched yet thus not difficult to switch to something else like FC.

Two key points to ponder are:

1. Why greenfield iSCSI environment came about in the first place?


2. What happens when these small installs are considered for expansion?

Going out a bit farther, I believe that further cost reductions in 10Gb ethernet technology will encourage people to take another look at an alternative to FC.

Myth #2 10Gb Ethernet will save the day for iSCSI.

This myth is created when people assume that major hurdle to iSCSI adoption is speed and feeds. If history is telling, a new technology doesn’t replace incumbents just because of incrementally higher performance. Either new technology has to blow the incumbents out of water with several folds increase in performance or offer a value proposition that is not present in incumbents.

Just consider this, nobody would care about data de-duplication if it was offering 2x increase over conventional compression, but a 20x increase gets everyone’s attention. From another perspective, today you will be considered underdog with a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) solution that doesn’t have de-dupe even though VTL with de-dupe is slightly slower performing due to extra de-dupe processing overhead.

Another underlying assumption of this myth is that performance of everything else connected to 10GbE will remain the same as with current 1GbE and data transfer requirements will not grow. Fat chance!

Before 10Gb Ethernet can be considered for underlying iSCSI infrastructure, it also needs to be fully entrenched in customer environment as preferred networking infrastructure technology. There are too many infrastructure and political challenges to kill any 10GbE adoption for iSCSI environment without the Ethernet owners having the first crack at it.

The above observations are based on my past experiences with few expansion projects for small iSCSI installs. One of the project even considered 10GbE. In the end, it was too easy to replace iSCSI install with FC-SAN than expand them.

Controversial Positioning

I close this post with two controversial iSCSI positioning statements that I believe are impeding it’s adoption. No explanation provided at this time and you are welcome to chime in, if you desire.

Position #1 iSCSI is a storage interconnect leveraging Ethernet.

Posiiton #2 iSCSI is a replacement for or complementary with FC.