iPhones Push Their Way Into Enterprise IT, Data Management

The next great wave of IT and data management may fit in your hand. Just ask Don MacAskill, CEO of Internet-based photo-sharing startup SmugMug, who uses his Apple iPhone as a data management console.

"Since it's running a full version of Safari, we treat it just like we treat our laptops and desktops -- if an appliance has a Web interface, we can use it on our iPhones," states MacAskill. "I can (and do) easily reboot any server from my iPhone, reconfigure and adjust our load balancers, and even log in to our LOM interfaces on each server to check their health. It's pretty sweet."

Since SmugMug switched from direct-attached storage to Amazon S3 last year, MacAskill doesn't use the iPhone for backup. But asked whether he'd do so if he had a SAN, his reply is quick: "We'd do it in a second."

MacAskill's main gripe is that Apple and AT&T won't sell iPhones to corporate accounts. "But we still jumped through hoops and put them in the hands of half of our employees, including all of our operations team and our engineers. The day they let us, the rest of our employees will get them."

While Apple and AT&T are holding out on corporate customers, browser-based access -- including access via PDA -- has nonetheless become a key feature for a growing number of data center services, particularly in the area of data backup and recovery."We use a PDA or any type of smart phone with a browser to manage our software installed on a server," says Dmitri Joukovski, VP of product marketing at backup software vendor Zmanda. While he acknowledges that backups are usually prescheduled, he insists it's possible to check the status of a backup job, or change its parameters, using his Apple iPhone.

Figure 1: Dmitri Joukovski of Zmanda offers this shot of an Amanda-based backup process viewed via an iPhone.
Source: Zmanda

Figure 2:

Another shot of Amanda Enterprise backup via iPhone.
Source: Zmanda

Of course, Joukovski, a former product manager for EMC's Legato Networker product, has a vested interest in pitching easy access to his company's wares. And he's recently upped the ante, since the Amanda Enterprise backup software, which three-year-old Zmanda developed from an open-source backup program created at the University of Maryland, is now offered for use with Amazon's S3 backup service.

To Page 2Here's how it works: Customers must first buy Amanda Enterprise, a package that backs up Exchange, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL applications on Linux or Solaris servers, with agents on Windows, Linux, or Solaris clients. (A typical subscription for one backup server with 10 clients and a tape autochanger with two drives is about $3,000, according to Zmanda.)

Amanda Enterprise can back up to disk or tape drives. On top of this, customers buy an option to back up to the Amazon S3 service using a "pay as you go" model that's based on a revenue-sharing agreement between Zmanda and Amazon. The option is sold by Zmanda as a subscription for about $200 per year; customers pay on top of this per Gbyte of storage used on the Amazon S3 network.

Zmanda makes money by charging a premium, starting at 15 cents per Gbyte, which the firm claims is 5 cents more than Amazon's starting charge of 10 cents per Gbyte. All support is handled by Zmanda, even though customers sign a contract agreement with Amazon S3 to get the service.

Joukovski says his iPhone really opens the potential of Amanda's use on Amazon S3. While some observers have predicted problems for IT managers from rampant iPhone use, Joukovski thinks it has the best IT remote-access potential of any PDA to date.

The remote access angle is gaining traction with other service providers. Iron Mountain and Seagate offer browser access for their respective LiveVault and Evault backup services. Iron Mountain also provides email alerts to customer BlackBerries and cellphones. A spokesman for Mozy, the consumer online backup provider bought by EMC for $76 million in October 2007 says his company offers a Web-based adminstrative console and Blackberry email alerts as well. These features will be carried into Mozy's planned enterprise services.Some experts don't see enterprise IT management as an appropriate candidate for PDA access. Zmanda's Joukovski admits that some IT pros he's talked to even resist the idea. "People are polarized about it," he says. "It depends on whether you're totally geeky, or concerned about security."

Speaking of security, Zmanda offers public and private key encryption as well as AES256, AES192, AES128, and hardware-based encryption based on cards from third parties. But Joukovski couldn't find a single Zmanda customer to testify to using the browser interface as he suggests.

Others have questions about the use of PDAs for managing data backups. "I don't know why someone would do it. Backups should just happen," says W. Curtis Preston, VP of consulting and services firm GlassHouse Technologies. "I question its value." He notes that the nature of Internet-based services like Amazon S3 often preclude doing full backups and instead rely on a "forever incremental" approach. Further, he's not convinced that "enterprise" means the same thing to some IT suppliers and their customers.

Texting in for the nightly backup report isn't widespread and may not be for a while. But the wheels of progress in bringing together the iPhone and IT are in motion. In the not-too-distant future, it may be a best practice to keep many data center management tasks, including backup, "in hand." Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.