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A Primer on Data Backup for Small- to Medium-Sized Companies (Video)

Posted by Roblimo on from the prepare-for-the-worst-days-and-the-best-days-will-take-care-of-themselves dept.

This is a conversation with Jeff Whitehead and Lou Montulli, respectively Vice President of Technical Operations/CTO and Chief Scientist for Zetta.net, a company that specializes in online backup and disaster recovery service. Also, while this interview was arranged without his help, in the interest of full disclosure we'd like to tell you that Zetta's CEO is Ali Jenab, who used to be CEO of Slashdot's parent company. But this discussion isn't about Ali or Zetta.net, but about data backup, and what methods are best and most cost-effective for companies ranging from home-based businesses up to enterprise operations with thousands of employees. Among other things, we discussed the importance of multiple-site storage for important data, a factor that was drilled in to us yesterday by an article titled Another Iron Mountain Fire Points Up Shortcomings of Physical Storage by long-time tech journalist Sharon Fisher. And never forget: You don't know how effective your backup and data storage arrangements are until you try to retrieve your data -- and if you don't try to retrieve data until you need it, and things don't work, you are in big trouble. (Don't see the video? Here's a link.)

8 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. AdBlock Plus not working by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why am I seeing this adert?

  2. How is this not blatent adversting? by Netdoctor · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Rob, lots of genuine, honest respect here. But with the dice acquisition and beta debacle, a lot of effort needs to be made by the editors here to avoid any appearance of using the readers as targeted customers. This interview doesn't help in that regard.

    1. Re:How is this not blatent adversting? by Draknor · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You make the assumption the editor's goal is NOT to use the readers as targeted customers.

      I'm not sure that's a valid assumption.

    2. Re:How is this not blatent adversting? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The thing is, if we talk to people who have skills or whose company does something useful to some Slashdot people, others assume it's an ad. But it's not. These are serious experts. We're going to do another interview with Lou one day, too, about the early days at Netscape, a company he cofounded.

      What I find amusing is that videos or other stories where we've been totally negative toward what the people are doing still get called "Slashvertisements" by some.

      Believe it or not, Slashdot editors have friends, and we even have products we like. For example, I like my Asus MemoPad tablet, my Samsung Victory Android phone, my Marlin 795 rifle, and my 1996 Jeep Cherokee. Does this mean I shouldn't say anything about them, but only about products I don't like?

      I won't talk about Dice except to say they get me my checks on time, and they just put somebody new in charge of Slashdot who seems like she's smart and wants to make Slashdot better, not worse. Slashdot Beta? There's a link to "Slashdot Classic" at the bottom of every Beta page. I'm back on "Slashdot Classic" myself because IMO Beta is nowhere near ready for broadcast at *any* time.

      But I'm no longer a boss, but an old retired guy who makes Slashdot videos and does a little writing here and there for side money. I often agree with readers more than management (the story of my life as a writer & editor), and I tell management what I think you want and generally get ignored. Example: I have said over and over that video preroll ads over 15 seconds are a bad idea, and that 30 seconds should be the dead maximum, ever. And still...

    3. Re:How is this not blatent adversting? by Roblimo · · Score: 4, Funny

      Whoops - I wrote the above comment without logging in. That makes me a cowardly anon, doesn't it? :)

  3. Re:don't have problems with LTO-4 tape by CanHasDIY · · Score: 2

    used SDLT for years with almost no problems
    used disk to disk backup for a year as well. very nice except the PHB gets a heart attack every time you ask for more disk. at least for database backups
    been on LTO-4 for 4 years. tapes are cheap. its fairly fast. and haven't had any problems with data corruption or tapes breaking

    looking at LTO-6 but the tapes are still fairly expensive

    Hey, now, don't go mucking up a perfectly good Slashvertisement by pointing out how unnecessary the product being slashvertized might be!

    --
    An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
  4. Re:don't have problems with LTO-4 tape by mlts · · Score: 2

    To me, it is simple: A LTO-4 tape native capacity is 800GB, each tape $30. That's $375 for 10 terabytes. If I wanted to move to LTO-6, that's $75-$80 a tape, so that's $320 for 10 terabytes uncompressed for four tapes.

    Ten TB of VNX space or Avamar space is going to cost you seven digits minimum, probably eight once EMC is done making you pay for all the options. Yes, there is "magic" with deduplication, but even that will fill up shortly.

    To boot, unlike Avamar or disk storage, the energy cost of having stored tapes is just HVAC, no having to keep spindles twirling. Plus, tapes are easy to keep physically secure. An intruder in Elbonia would have to get someone on site and into the tape safe to access stored data there, compared to just kicking open a cloud provider and snarfing data from their backend arrays without needing to bribe/coerce someone to physically grab the media and stuff the tape in the silo.

    However, tape is "your father's Oldsmobile", and even though it does work, the disk and cloud salespeople always end up getting the PHBs to spend the big bucks on something that ends up getting completely used up within days to weeks.

  5. Re:don't have problems with LTO-4 tape by LordLimecat · · Score: 2

    An array like you mentioned would have to be whiteboxed to meet the budget of an LTO drive, and even there its doubtful (24TB Raw is gonna run you close to $2000 once you figure in all the hardware). A new LTO4/5 drive is generally gonna be under $2000, and an 8-bay autoloader can be found for under $4k.

    The real beauty of tape is that its easy to store offline. A nasty surge could easily fry all 24TB of your storage at once. The platters may be in tact, but have fun doing a platter swap with your backup data. Say it with me now: Online RAID arrays are not good backups. All the best disaster recovery scenarios will involve offline media transported offsite so that a single nasty lightning strike cant kill all of your data (either thru surge or through magnetic wiping).