Online Backup Services - Six Questions

During my visit to Denver few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to talk with folks working with online backup and archive cloud services. Some of my impressions from these discussions are interesting and worth sharing. These are based on what I heard from professionals working for or providing services to online backup service providers. These are not result of a full-blown survey, and at best anecdotal. You are welcome to respond to these questions if you like via comments, emails or your own blog post.

Q1: Who are the primary adopters of Online Backup Services?

Individuals and small businesses.
Entities with fewer than a dozen workstations .
Few with a centralized server.

Q2: What was the primary backup method before adopting online backup?

None.
A USB key or USB attached disk drive.
Few with a share on another workstation.

Q3: What was the offsite backup strategy before adopting online backup?

None.
A Floppy, USB key or CD with important files.
Few with a mobile HD.

Q4: What is the subscription and retention rates for online backup service?

High subscription rate.
Very low retention rate.
Most abandoned service within few weeks.

Q5: What are the primary reasons provided for discontinuing use of online backup service?

Excessive use of Internet connection.
Backup takes too long.
Poor experience during primary use of workstation.

Q6: What was the backup method after discontinuing online backup?

A USB attached disk drive.
A NAS device on network.
Few with no backup method.

Summary

Overall, online backup services seems to be a great way to introduce backups to people with no prior backup methods as only few reverted back to no backups after discontinuing use of online backup service. Tape is non-existent in environments that are finding online backups attractive. Despite heightened awareness of online backup service, the low bandwidth connection to Internet continues to be main hurdle in retaining subscribers, a focus on spending limited resources on sales improving or cost reducing services over a fear-based buying decision. A comment I heard was,

I prefer to allocate 50% of Internet bandwidth to VoIP services that reduce my telecommunication cost instead of to offsite backup.

Denver Visit, New Piñata & Scalability Videos

Week in Denver

I will be in Denver this week till Friday June 27th. Unfortunately, I will miss nPost Golf 2.0 event in Seattle.

Despite a busy work day schedule in Denver, I am looking forward to seeing some friends and colleagues also. If you are a fellow storage blogger or reader or working on a cool storage technology and located in Denver area, ping me and we can meet one evening during my visit.

New Piñata for EMC & IBM

Recently, a reader alerted me to new Data Domain blog Dedupe Matters written by Brian Biles. Welcome Brian to the world of Bloggers. Lets see how quickly EMC and IBM bloggers make you the new piñata like they did to HDS bloggers. ;-)

In any case, it’s a nice change from their rumored no blogging policy. Hopefully, blogging at Data Domain will go beyond people in Ivory Towers.

Video of Presentations from Google Scalability Conference

Google already uploaded the videos of presentations from last week's Google Scalability Conference. I also plan to discuss some of the presentation topics in further details as time permits.

Welcome Remarks by Brian Bershad



GIGA+ by Swapnil Patil



HPC with NetworkSpaces for R by David Hendersen



Chapel by Brad Chamberlain



SMP via Transactional Memory by Vijay Menon



Communicating Like Nemo by Jennifer Wong



Maidsafe by David Irvine



CARMEN by Paul Watson



Scalable Wikipedia by Thorsten Schuett

Google Conference on Scalability - First Impression

As expected from conference schedule, Google conference turned out to be a technical event primarily focused on parallel programming and infrastructure scalability. At last minute, Google decided to merge two tracks in to one. Though, I got to attend all the sessions, they felt time-compressed and rushed. I was surprised to see lot of attendees who came from outside Seattle. I met quite a few people from Bay area, Canada and Europe. I enjoyed the sessions though some audience members commented about very technical nature of the conference compared to previous year. As Brian Bershad, Google commented in his welcome speech, the challenge is to find technologies and solutions to scale handling search queries from 600 million to 6 billion. And, I came away better informed on different challenges and potential solutions we may see down the road.

I also sat down and chatted with Robin Harris. We decided to forego making a video of our conversation. I am not a big fan of talking head videos or podcasts unless they leverage the unique values of these methods not available through written words or pictures. And who wants to listen to two storage bloggers chatting about nothing. I find them miserable myself so why put others through the same misery.

In my opinion, three sessions: CARMEN: a Scalable Science Cloud [PDF], GIGA+: Scalable Directories for Shared File Systems [PDF] and maidsafe stood out at the conference from infrastructure scalability perspective. Communicating Like Nemo was very entertaining. The common theme in audience questions on most infrastructure presentations was reliability, availability, scalability, and security of the offered solution. It is a good indication of what is on the mind of people when evaluating new infrastructure offerings. With the popularity of hashing in storage of data, speeding up hash lookup is becoming an interesting problem for scalability.

David Irvine's session on maidsafe was the only session where a speaker white-boarded most of the presentation. His confidence and knowledge was commendable. Not many speakers can pull off white-boarding 80% of presentation with 100s in audience. Comparing maidsafe with ant colony was an interesting way to show scalability and simplicity of solution. Maidsafe solution seems to be in same category as RevStor, Seanodes, Cleversafe, Oceanstor, Farsite and several others that are trying to leverage storage across 100s and 1,000s of distributed nodes in a peer-to-peer or quid pro quo network, a solution most likely attractive to players in cloud and web distribution market.