Picking Online Storage Services: Top Tips

Storage managers considering online backup services face a dizzying array of choices these days. There is backup SaaS, typified by Carbonite, EMC's Mozy Enterprise, and the Symantec Protection Network. There are network-based services such as Amazon's S3 and the Storage Delivery Network from Nirvanix. Not to mention more traditional online backup and storage services from Iron Mountain or Canada-based Storagepipe, to name just two.

Experts say keeping a few key points in mind may help IT pros navigate these and other offerings in the growing mass of online storage services. Here are some nuggets we culled from talking to vendors, analysts, and customers:

Keep your requirements in mind up front. An enterprise using online services for e-discovery or compliance archiving/searching will demand more of its service provider than a firm that sells space for personal photo albums. "Nobody in consumer online backup really has SLAs, but it's not that big a deal. If I stopped backing up your PC for a few minutes you probably wouldn't notice," says David Friend, CEO and president of Carbonite. On the other hand, when the lawyers call a financial services firm, the time required to retrieve an important file will be noted.

Do the math. It may help to match what you expect to get out of online services with what you are willing to pay, then decide where to make tradeoffs. Enterprise-style services are still expensive: A sample quote provided to Byte and Switch today by NetMass, a service provider that uses Asigra Televaulting software to provide online backup, called for $4,000 per month plus $8 per Gigabyte overage for a subscription to protect 1.5 Terabytes of data. There's also a $250 installation fee per site.

Of course, Asigra-based services like NetMass's feature a range of enterprise-grade features, including a grid architecture that scales; compression and de-duplication of data to reduce overhead and improve bandwidth consumption; replication, CDP, and other backup and archiving features; and a range of encryption options. Not everyone needs all that.On the other hand, last week's Amazon S3 outage showed the disadvantages of going with a smaller-scale service that sells for pennies per Gigabyte.

Adjust expectations. Don't necessarily count on an online backup service for fear of hiccups. "We expect Amazon to have outages. No Website Im aware of doesn’t, whether it’s Google, Amazon, your bank, or SmugMug," says Don MacAskill, CEO of the online photo repository SmugMug. If your end users in a remote office typically don't need to recover backed-up data within 24 hours, using an online backup service that caves in now and again could still be worth the removal of extra operational stress a remote site would otherwise put on data center backup.

Explore guarantees. SaaS risk can be offset in various ways. Iron Mountain, for instance, offers a service called Technology Escrow -- suppliers of online services have used to safeguard data that may be required to recreate an online application, and therefore keep it available, in the event of an outage. Ask your larger service provider whether they subscribe to such an offering. Smaller providers, like Nirvanix, may offer SLAs.

Keep your network in mind. Some online backup services will require hefty amounts of bandwidth to support multiple sites. That's why Nicholas Joseph, network administrator at Orion Registrar Inc., a Denver-based group that registers environmental system compliance with worldwide standards, declined to sign on for Symantec's online backup service, even though he loves the associated product, Backup Exec 12. "We didn't need the service, and we also weren't ready to upgrade our network the way we would have had to," he notes. To get the most out of the service would have called for a dedicated T1 link or fiber connection.

Check that service providers can accommodate a range of WAN connection options. "We offer an optional direct connection if you don't want to use the Internet," says Steven Rodin, president of Storagepipe, an IBM Tivoli partner. He notes that some customers prefer to have dedicated links of their own rather than relying on public access.Consider the cloud. Large enterprise customers need to examine the infrastructure used by a prospective storage service provider. In today's parlance, this is the "cloud computing" platform the vendor uses to launch SaaS services -- EMC's Fortress and IBM's Blue Cloud are examples. If you're going to spend big, check out your provider's "cloud" for redundant facilities, ISP proximity, security, equipment quality, and the like.

Some smaller-scale providers make much of their infrastructure, too. Nirvanix, for example, claims its clustered architecture provides multiple paths for data retrieval. If a server or storage device should fail on Nirvanix's sites, customers would still be able to retrieve data, the supplier claims. "There is no single instance where files are trapped," says Nirvanix CMO Jonathan Buckley.

Don't get snowed. There is nothing new about online backup services per se. But the growth of social networking, e-discovery trends, and other forces are at work to increase the need for storage at every level of an organization -- and suppliers are responding in kind. Beware of old services dressed as new ones, complete with some of the old woes associated with facilities-based "storage service providers" -- the dinosaurs of storage services.

Scalability is one of these problems. "Ten years ago, one reason the SSPs didn't pan out was that they were catering to applications that had too much data," says analyst Greg Schulz of the StorageIO Group. "It was a scaling issue." Today, the emphasis on SMBs by many providers hints that scalability is still an issue.

As online backup services proliferate, choosing among them will no doubt get more confusing. But keeping basics such as the above items in mind may help get the process off to the right start.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.