RBS Receives “Honorable Mention” Among Top Online Backup Software
News Feed (Infostor) – The entry of heavyweights such as EMC and Symantec may spur increased interest in online backup and recovery.
Impending hurricanes and wild fires are examples of external events that can drive organizations to move quickly to correct weaknesses in their backup-and-recovery methods. Looming deadlines-in the areas of compliance or software license renewals-represent other events that can prompt companies to invest in, or deploy a new approach to, data protection. In our look at the use of online backup service providers, such events became the impetus for change in each of the customer cases we profiled.
Traditionally targeted at small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), online backup services have been filling a niche for companies that suffer from either a lack of IT resources or inadequate backup routines.
Take Biscayne Aquaculture, which specializes in the construction of aquatic filtration systems for zoos and aquariums, including SeaWorld Orlando and Sandals Resorts. A few years ago, the company found its Miami office on a potential collision course with Hurricane Frances.
Having previously relied on staff to perform much of their own Windows and Macintosh workstation backups to a central server, where data would then be periodically burned to CDs or copied to external hard drives, Biscayne Aquaculture began looking at what would happen if the office were destroyed. “We realized that if our facility was wiped out, our on-site backups would be useless,” says Jim Post, a company co-founder and the director of project development.
This thinking led Post and others at the company to explore how they could take backups off-site to better protect the company’s critical CAD and 3D drawings, along with other operational data. After considering manual backup and delivery to off-site locations, Post and his team evaluated Arsenal Digital Solutions’ ViaRemote online backup service.
“We got it running within two hours of our first call,” says Post, who noted the subsequent off-site backup of the company’s critical data was “a huge burden off our shoulders.” Biscayne Aquaculture’s backup process now involves individual PCs at the company’s Miami and Austin offices being backed up nightly to central servers, which are in turn automatically backed up over the wire to an Arsenal Digital site.
“We don’t have to do anything now or worry about whether or not somebody backed up his or her information,” says Post. “ViaRemote just automatically updates every night. We just check into it and make sure it’s happened.”
Biscayne Aquaculture is just one example of an SMB taking advantage of online backup service providers to help them move into the benefits of disk-to-disk backup, without having to hassle with the complexity or additional software/hardware licenses typically required to implement D2D architectures internally.
Disaster strikes
Jean-Paul Issok is another user who can attest to the relief he experienced after handing off his data protection to an online backup provider. Issok is the owner of Culver City, CA-based Quality Business Consulting, a small firm that specializes in construction accounting software for approximately 125 customers.
Hearing reports of the devastating effect of mountain wild fires on local area businesses, Issok began to look at online backup as an option to protect his staff’s programming-related files, customer-specific reports, company collateral, and accounts receivable data. Having sporadically used LiveVault (now owned by Iron Mountain Digital) and US Data Trust for a few customers in the past, Issok was already familiar with the concept of online backup. But, he admits his own company’s backup practices were inadequate.
Issok set out to develop a better disaster- recovery plan to protect against worst-case scenarios. He evaluated backup providers with facilities that could store his backup data (and, possibly, some of his customers’ data) on the East Coast. This is when he came across Intronis, a New Jersey-based online backup provider of a service called eSureIT, which includes two mirrored facilities in Parsippany, NJ, and Toronto.
Little did Issok know at the time that his move to online backup with eSureIT would save his business when his office was completely destroyed by a fire originating from a recently purchased battery backup unit under his desk. The subsequent fire, which began in the middle of the night, destroyed the entire fourth floor of the cinderblock building inhabited by his business and others.
Thanks to Intronis’ online backup-and-recovery service, Issok was able to quickly restore all of his company’s data.
Customer becomes reseller
Besides appreciating Intronis’ backup services, Issok also liked the business opportunity that Intronis presented for him to resell and re-brand Intronis services to his own customer base-a practice he now oversees for several of his accounting software customers and nearly 200GB of backup data.
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Online backup service providers at-a-glance
Admittedly just scratching the surface of online backup service providers, the following “A-List” represents the companies that most analysts agree have the biggest impact in the space. Other notables identified by one or more analysts appear below as “Honorable Mentions.”
Analysts’ “A-List”
Asigra (offered exclusively via MSP channel partners)
Arsenal Digital Solutions
EMC (acquired Berkeley Data Systems)
EVault (a Seagate company)
Iron Mountain Digital
Symantec (service not yet generally available)
Candidates for “Honorable Mention”
BluePoint Data Storage
Carbonite
Incentra Solutions
Intronis
Remote Backup Systems (RBS)
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In fact, offering either core backup services or backup software technology licenses as an added sales opportunity to resellers is a common sales channel strategy in the online backup market. Many grand-daddies in the space-including Asigra, EVault, Arsenal Digital, and Iron Mountain Digital-have expanded their markets via this practice, with companies such as Asigra making it their primary sales strategy (see figure).
According to Adam Couture, principal analyst in Gartner Inc.’s storage services, this practice makes life both easier and harder for companies trying to investigate their online backup choices. “Most often, what you see is that a service provider is either reselling someone’s service by just passing it on through without the customer even knowing it. Or, they are licensing somebody’s technology,” says Couture. “If you get managed backup from SunGard or managed backup from IPR International, for example, it’s based on EVault technology. If you get managed backup from HP or Digitiliti, it’s based on Asigra technology.”
Since there are only a few technology vendors behind most of the online backup services, the process of vendor evaluation can be made a little easier, according to Couture. “You can start by evaluating the base technologies instead of sifting through hundreds of vendor Websites. But, as reselling online backup services becomes an easier proposition for vendors, the field is likely to get even more crowded than it already is.”
In evaluating online backup services providers, Gartner’s Couture notes the importance of learning the following:
What steps the provider follows to ensure data recoverability;
How long the vendor has been in business;
Whether they schedule tests to ensure the process works;Any guarantees they can offer that backups will occur and when they will occur; and
Whether the penalties have “teeth;” Couture warns to make sure there is some punishment, usually financial, to service providers if they don’t meet their SLA. (See sidebar for other guidelines to investigating online backup services providers, p. 26.)
The ‘Wild West’
“It’s like the Wild West,” according to Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting, noting that new players are breaking into the online backup market all the time-a factor that he believes is keeping end-user pricing relatively low. Staimer thinks backup service providers may represent the fastest-growing segment of the backup market. “In every city, you’ll find dozens of options: Some are resellers, some have their own technology, and some are a mix of the two.”
Business is booming for many online backup providers. Earlier this year, Arsenal Digital announced its sixth-straight year of double-digit revenue and customer growth. In July, Memphis-based Remote Backup Systems (RBS) announced the completion of its most successful quarter in the company’s 20-year history- attributable to growing sales of its RBackup software offered directly to customers and via RBS’s online service provider channel. AmeriVault even made Inc. Magazine’s 5,000 list of the fastest-growing companies, due in large part to its 96% growth rate over the past three years.
While some online backup service providers are experiencing rapid growth, Gartner’s Couture says the overall market remains relatively small, running at about $500 million in revenue, according to his estimates. This might be why some of the established players seemed optimistic and relatively unconcerned about the anticipated entry of heavyweights such as EMC and Symantec into the online backup market. EMC recently acquired Berkeley Data Systems (see sidebar, below), and Symantec is expected to enter the market by year-end.
Yet, in such a crowded field of providers, some users might find themselves struggling with how best to narrow down their options. Although there are often differences in the technology or service level agreements offered by different providers, here’s how most of the online backup services work: A company’s data is backed up through the network “cloud” to an off-site data center. In most cases, backup data is compressed, reduced, encrypted, and pushed across a WAN or a high-speed DSL/broadband connection to one of the service provider’s off-site backup locations.
While some users may struggle to make sense of the provider options, the choice for others can be as simple as which provider happens to get there first-with the right product, attitude, and price. This was the case in our two other customer profiles.
