
by Tom O’Connor – databackup.ie
I want to be a pioneer like Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jr, even Willy Higinbotham in the industry I work in Online Backup, when I am at business meetings, networking events, or trade shows people refer to what I do as “Cloud Computing” however when I try and turn our technology in the direction of real cloud computing what kills online backup in its tracks is the connectivity available in a modern day Irish Business.
Big storage providers, like Amazon S3 are now even compliant with the EU Data Protection Directive , there is even open source backup software available which does not require an OS it runs its own which goes head to head and is as feature rich as the leading commercial software we currently use.
However no matter how much I calculate figures, the costs, and the features! I come to the same problem
In order for online backup to work, we need to be able to take a seed load onto a hard disk in the customers office and bring it back to the data centre.
Furthermore we must be able to quickly get the data back to our customers on disk when they need it and cant wait on a 19 day download
.
This means we must have access to our servers and San’s at all times, something these cloud providers don’t supply.
Take an average customer with 100 Gigabytes of data, on a dsl line with a half a mbit up download speed, (believe me that’s a good speed for most customers, who are paying for a 10 mbit line)
It would actually take that customer 19 days to upload their 100 GB, can you believe that, 19 days!! To download a half mbit you would be looking at another 19 days!! The customers business might survive the fire, the hurricane or typhoon that destroyed its data but the 19 day wait to get it back, I’m not so sure!
OK I know what your thinking, your like but we have a 10mbit line, but what your not told in many cases is that 10mbit line is either 512k to 1mbit up, and theres not a chance in hell your going to get near the max speed. As for downloading if you get 1.5 mbit down which is a hell of a fast line you would be looking at a wait time of about 6 and a half days.
Now you know why databackup.ie has managed data backup under our logo, we manage your backups both outside and inside the cloud!