{"id":2847,"date":"2014-05-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-16T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/otava.test\/staying-ahead-of-the-enterprise-cloud-backup-and-recovery-curve\/"},"modified":"2014-05-16T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-16T00:00:00","slug":"staying-ahead-of-the-enterprise-cloud-backup-and-recovery-curve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/blog\/staying-ahead-of-the-enterprise-cloud-backup-and-recovery-curve\/","title":{"rendered":"Staying ahead of the enterprise cloud backup and recovery curve"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of May, I\u2019m speaking on a panel at IMN\u2019s Data Center East Conference in New York City. The panel is titled \u201cStaying Ahead of the Curve on Services (for data center operators)\u201d and will focus its message on market demand for managed services that deliver high value for colocation<\/a> and cloud computing<\/a> users.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Mike Klein
Online Tech
Co-CEO<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I define high value as an essential service that a service provider can deliver at a lower cost and with higher quality than their clients can build or buy on their own. For example, many colocation providers offer \u201crack & stack\u201d service to rack and wire servers in colocation racks. \u201cRack & stack\u201d is a good example of a \u201cwin-win\u201d service. It is typically far more cost effective for the full-time staff at the data center to rack and wire new servers in the rack than for a client to drive to the data center to do it themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cRack & stack\u201d services give both the service provider and the client a \u201cwin.\u201d\u00a0 The service provider uses their full-time staff that has expertise wiring thousands of servers with a process and documentation that delivers a high quality experience.\u00a0 The service provider can deliver the service profitably and more cost effectively compared to their clients\u2019 staff time and travel costs to and from the data center.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s much like when I hire a plumber. I may be able to do the work myself, but when I consider the cost of my time and the quality of my own plumbing work, it\u2019s a higher value \u2013 and safer – to have the job done correctly and quickly by a professional. (My wife would agree that hiring a plumber is \u201cwin-win\u201d for our household.)<\/em><\/p>\n

From our experience, two of the highest value managed services<\/a> a data center operator can provide are backup<\/a> and managed security services.\u00a0 I\u2019ll talk about security services in a future blog post \u2013 for now, let\u2019s discuss enterprise backup and recovery services for colocation<\/a> and cloud computing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The single highest uptake of all of the services we offer at Online Tech is our managed backup offering. I use it as an example of a high value managed service that data center operators can use to deliver a strong value to their clients with a good return on their investment in people, tools and processes \u2013 a true \u201cwin-win\u201d service in my book.<\/p>\n

There are a number of ways to deliver backup services. Some providers offer unmanaged backup \u2013 with a local or offsite storage target where the client loads and manages the backup software. For clients willing to take on the burden of managing their own backups, this DIY option provides the ultimate in flexibility because the client can select the backup software, schedule, network bandwidth and the amount of storage they need.<\/p>\n

Another popular approach used by many of the commodity cloud providers is daily snapshots. This is typically a local copy of the entire virtual cloud server as a file that a client can fall back on if they lose their server. While cheap to deploy and easy to offer, our experience is that many clients shy away from this approach because:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. they prefer to have their data offsite to protect the data in case of a disaster at the production data center; and;<\/li>\n
  2. the work it takes to restore a single file makes it impractical to do file-level restoration \u2013 you can only restore the entire snapshot of the whole server.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Contrary to popular belief that backups are primarily used to recover from major incidents or total loss of data<\/a>, 95 percent of the time our clients use their backup to recover a single lost or corrupted file. Less than 5 percent of the time backups are actually used for a total system recovery. We\u2019ve seen file level restoration to one of the highest demand use cases for backup services.<\/p>\n

    At Online Tech, we decided to offer a full service offsite backup<\/a> product that:<\/p>\n