Zmanda Sees The Sunshine In Cloud Backup

Among the rays of sunshine in the current economic climate are the innovations and acquisitions of the large information infrastructure companies. They are not immune to the recession, but they are taking advantage of the situation to better position themselves for the future. Smaller companies also contribute to this market dynamism in more targeted contexts. One of those companies is Zmanda which sees a silver economic lining in cloud backup.

To the surprise of many who have never heard of it, Zmanda is an emerging company (founded 2005) that claims worldwide leadership in open source backup. Its mission is to bring the benefits of open source (namely open standards and lower costs of ownership) to the backup market.

Zmanda provides software and services based on Amanda, which is the world's leading open source backup and recovery software. Amanda was initially developed at the University of Maryland and has been in the public domain since 1991. All leading Linux distributions package it. Zmanda is now the major developer of new releases of Amanda, with a vibrant open source community providing active QA and feedback.

So how does Zmanda make money when a customer can get Amanda for free? The answer is by the sale of products built on the Amanda base as well as by providing services and support to those customers who don't want to do everything on their own. Zmanda offers an annual subscription fee model similar to those pioneered by open source leaders Red Hat and MySQL.

One of the company's products is Amanda Enterprise which was the first backup solution for what is now called cloud computing environments. Although the backup server has to be open standards based (i.e., Linux or Solaris), Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, or Solaris can use Amanda Enterprise as clients. In addition, Amanda Enterprise supports storage media including disk (NAS, SAN, DAS), tape, VTL, or a storage cloud. Given the Web-based Zmanda Management Console (ZMC), backup operations can be managed from virtually anywhere (an important feature if you are a system administrator on vacation and your CEO happens to delete their important spreadsheet!).Another type of commercial product that Zmanda offers is what it calls Zmanda Recovery Managers (ZRM). These are stand-alone solutions designed to backup specific applications or specific platforms, for example, MySQL. ZRM can integrate with Amanda or other network-based backup.

Zmanda also has an Oracle Agent for Linux and Solaris, as well as one for Windows. That Zmanda's solutions fit well with the Sun/Oracle deal would seem to be an understatement. Plus, Zmanda works with Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft SQL Server so the company also plays wherever Microsoft makes a living.

Zmanda is also an emerging player in cloud backup with over a hundred customers already backing up to the cloud. Interestingly enough, with Amanda Enterprise the company has now been a player in what is now called cloud backup for about 2 years. In addition to Amanda Enterprise, the company also offers Zmanda Cloud Backup for backing up Windows server environments to a cloud (hence drawing battle lines with Mozy).

What role or roles can the cloud play in storage processes? For one, the cloud qualifies as secondary storage where the primary storage at a data center backs up to the cloud directly. Cloud environments can also provide tertiary storage where data is backed up on local secondary storage. In such cases, the storage cloud is used to keep another copy of backup data for processes such as disaster recovery.

Zmanda works with a number of high profile clients for whom the company backs up to the Amazon S3 cloud. Moreover, Amazon handles all the billing, which relieves Zmanda of that considerable burden. Zmanda also plans to work with future cloud computing infrastructures including Sun Cloud and Microsoft Azure, as soon as these cloud offerings become production-ready.Open source cloud storage offers clients several benefits, a primary one being price predictability. Zmanda charges its customers 20 cents per/gigabyte per/month for storage on Amazon's U.S. datacenters, and 25 cents per/gigabyte per/month for storage on Amazon's European datacenters. While this is more than Amazon charges for raw storage, the extra cost is for the value-added Zmanda-based backup service. The value of working with open source is that a customer is not locked into a proprietary data format which offers the option to switch clouds at will (except for the pain of data migration), keeping things competitive.

The key concept here might be called fluidity. Storage requirements are not a one size fits all proposition. A customer may need to divide the backup load between two or more clouds to meet regulatory requirements (Europe vs. U.S.), for disaster recovery (to achieve guaranteed distances between datacenters), for different service support levels for different application data, or simply for negotiating leverage. Using a single Web-based solution like Zmanda means that only one product has to be learned. Moreover, if data migration should ever be needed, while painful, it would be technically feasible.

Zmanda provides some value added features with Zmanda Cloud Backup including location control (mandatory in Europe), built-in data integrity checking during data transfer, transfer block size control that takes advantage of different network capabilities and encryption.

Our take is that Zmanda is riding two trends that we believe will likely to continue to prosper -- open source and cloud backup. Even after the hoped for economic recovery arrives, businesses are likely to maintain their now ingrained habits of hacking away at costs. Both open source and cloud backup play well into that mentality.

As Damon Runyon once said, "The race may not be to the swift nor the victory to the strong but that's how you bet." Even in the face of potential strong competition, Zmanda has the strength in open source and has swiftly moved to leverage key relationships, notably that of Amazon. Cloud backup is not a horse race, but if it were Zmanda would attract a lot of enthusiastic bettors.