The Bare Metal Facts

12:05 PM -- This last while, the industry focus on backup and archiving for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) has produced a series of observations that seem to have taken hold. In conferences, announcements, and user testimonials, the following basic tenets of SMB backup have emerged:

How come the big storage suppliers aren't listening?

Oh, they claim to be. Every time you turn around, HP, IBM, EMC, NetApp, and others are in your face about their SMB support. But scratch the surface, and that support gets more complicated.

Take bare metal restoral, for instance. The ability to bring up a server from the ground up, operating system and all, doesn't come as part of SMB backup/archiving systems from EMC, HP, or IBM. (See Unitrends Steps Up.) And yet, the combination of disk drives, tape interfaces, and backup/archiving capabilities is key to SMB offerings from all of them.

EMC's AX150, for instance, does not support bare metal restoral. To get that, you have buy a program called Insignia on top of the $6,000-plus you'll pay for the AX150.HP's Virtual Library Systems (VLSs) don't come with bare metal restore, either. Instead, HP relies on a tape drive program called One Button Disaster Recovery to restore servers from tape only.

IBM's TS7520, the system Big Blue says competes most closely with HP's VLS, also doesn't feature bare metal restore. To get it, you'll need to have IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager software installed, so you can add a package called Cristie Bare Machine Recovery.

This isn't to downplay the features and functions the big players offer, which are considerable. Nor is it meant to showcase products from smaller players like Unitrends that do support bare metal restoral, but have their share of drawbacks.

But one thing is clear: Larger vendors will have to do a better job of packaging and pricing their wares if they mean to keep up with the real challenges facing small customers.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch