Online data backup and storage Software as a
Service (SaaS) have been growing over the last six months, with
the arrival of Web 2.0 titans Google Inc. and Amazon.com in the
storage and backup markets. Meanwhile, lesser known players on
the Web are also gobbling up users and not just from traditional
in-house backup environments. Some users, who had already
embraced managed services, are finding the new Web-based
services cheaper and easier to deploy.
One such user, Chuck Ladd, principal for Strahan Associates
Architects, a Raleigh, N.C.-based architectural firm, was
previously interviewed by SearchStorage.com last year about his
decision to use a
backup service provider called ViaRemote
from Arsenal Digital Solutions Inc. through his Internet service
provider (ISP), Time-Warner Cable Co. At the time, Ladd praised
the service as an alternative to weekly drives to an offsite
vault for tapes and daily wrestling with backup software and
tape drives. But, he said, by February of this year he'd soured
on some aspects of ViaRemote.
Chief among them was cost. "We were paying [ViaRemote] $899 per
month when we stopped. They weren't making the cost/benefit
analysis anymore," Ladd said. That charge was for approximately 60
GB of protected data, averaging about 400 MB to 500 MB of nightly
backups.
Ladd said his first recourse was to try to reduce the amount of
data being backed up by archiving some older files to DVD. But, he
said, it barely made a dent in the amount of data as new projects
were filed and so made little difference in the cost.
Meanwhile, Ladd said he'd been intrigued by the idea of a
Web-based
data backup service, but searched for
several months in late 2006 and found none of the vendors to his
liking. "I liked how cheap they were," he said, "but none of
them offered the level of service that ViaRemote did, like a
hardened site and automated backup."
In December, Ladd said he came across a service called MozyPro,
a new offering from consumer data backup services provider Berkeley
Data Systems Inc., targeted at the enterprise market.
"They were the first service I saw at a lower price that had a
professional-grade facility for storing data," Ladd said, recalling
another service he evaluated for even less that consisted of
someone who would back up his data to the basement of his home.
MozyPro, meanwhile, like other SaaS offerings from Google and
Amazon, is part of much larger Berkeley Data, which also stores
data for 170,000 consumer backup customers with a petabyte of
storage at its data center. The enterprise service includes
additional features for business users, like encryption and
bandwidth throttling on workstations being backed up. Ladd signed
up, but he didn't discontinue ViaRemote right away.
While testing the service, Ladd said he was particularly
impressed with the bandwidth throttling feature, since he is
working with a standard Internet connection. "That way if our
backup server is still running when we come to work, we can
throttle the backup bandwidth down to 128 Kbps between the hours of
8 a.m. and 6 p.m., so it doesn't interfere with our business," he
said. ViaRemote charges separately for backing up PCs and servers,
and due to budget restrictions Ladd said he had to maintain Outlook
inboxes on a centralized file server rather than on employees'
workstations. With MozyPro, according to Ladd, each workstation is
backed up directly.
Most of all, Ladd said, he was happy with the cost, which so far
has worked out to around $60 per month. "That was the bottom line,"
he said. "There was nothing actually technically wrong with
ViaRemote." Ladd also added that Arsenal Digital's relationship
with his ISP meant initial backups had been much easier with that
service, because Time Warner opened up more bandwidth for it after
he signed up. With MozyPro, the initial backup took several days
over the Internet connection at Strahan. (Arsenal Digital,
meanwhile, announced two new services this week that perform
initial backups and whole-site restores using an Arsenal technician
and a portable server, rather than relying on the WAN, priced at
$1,500 for initial backups and $2,500 for recoveries.)
Meanwhile, MozyPro, which was officially launched last week
after collecting, according to Berkeley Data's claims, 2,500
enterprise users in 90 days since its first release in December,
isn't just appealing to little shops, according to Berkeley's
founder and CEO, Josh Coates. Coates said that this includes a
Fortune 10 company which recently signed a global contract with
MozyPro and dumped the No. 1 online remote data service provider to
do so (we're not supposed to say who they got rid of, but we're
sure you can guess).
As for Strahan's case, Arsenal Digital spokesperson Adam Trunkey
responded, "There are a lot of products on the market and customers
should pick one with a track record of success protecting business
critical information."