If Your Cloud Vendor Goes Out of Business, Are You Ready?

storagedude writes: With Amazon Web Services losing an estimated $2 billion a year, it's not inconceivable that the cloud industry could go the way of storage service providers (remember them?). So any plan for cloud services must include a way to retrieve your data quickly in case your cloud service provider goes belly up without much notice (think Nirvanix). In an article at Enterprise Storage Forum, Henry Newman notes that recovering your data from the cloud quickly is a lot harder than you might think. Even if you have a dedicated OC-192 channel, it would take 11 days to move a petabyte of data – and that's with no contention or other latency. One possible solution: a failover agreement with a second cloud provider – and make sure it's legally binding.

Comments

incremental backups

[gbjbaanb]

This is the same problem we've always had, whether its someone's website on a shared host or a colo server. You need to back it all up and doing a naive dump of the entire thing will take too long and cost too much in bandwidth, so you take a dump of the entire thing once (preferably when you have the thing you're deploying locally) and then take incremental backups from there.

The big question is what's the best backup tools to do this, and do they work on cloud systems that don't look like real servers? eg. I recall rsoft that did very good incrementals based on disk blocks changing so the backups were also continuous. Not sure if that'd fly on AWS.

Re:incremental backups

[jbolden]

You can do the same things just not on the file levels. Most of your clouds are using a SAN for databases. SAN's do backups like you say. You create matching LUNs on both devices and incrementally track changes to blocks between the SANs. You can just ask your cloud provider what SAN they are using and have them configure this sort of setup for you to another provider.

In the case of AWS they provide backup servers directly connected to their production servers so you just backup to AWS. And if you want to move the backup from there to somewhere else it is trivial since it is already organized for backup.

I hate hardware

[skovnymfe]

I hate hardware and for all intents and purposes it can go shove itself up its own ass. As a result I very much love the cloud, no matter how much of a buzzword it is. Let someone else worry about the tedious busywork it is to get one piece of hardware to talk to another. Oh what's that? A disk died? I don't give a damn because I don't have to drive 30 minutes each direction just to change it. Ha!

Re:My thoughts

[jellomizer]

Cloud offers a lot of real advantages over doing it all yourself.
1. Having resources when you need it. Lets say you have some seasonal tasks that needs extra horse power (Quarterly Reports, Christmas Rush, Back To School, Exam Time...) so you can request short term extra power to keep up. Without having all this extra equipment running nearly idle for 3/4 of the year.

2. Hardware upgrade, maintenance, backups... Keeping your hardware up to date is expensive, if you are keeping your old servers you will try to keep them for 6-8 years normally as to get the most out of them. However that means your servers are getting behind the times and are at risk of breaking. As well having to pay for redundant backup servers. Managing good data backup and storage policies. While might be easy for a couple of servers for larger demand it could become a huge waste of your time. The cloud company should be doing this maintenance. They get the advantage of dealing with a larger set.

But I don't like cloud for the sake of cloud. Adobe Cloud, Office 365 and most of your software that you really just want on your PC and not pay a monthly fee for. Sure cloud backup such as Google Drive but your device has adequate power to run these apps without a huge server farm in the background.
 

Local Backups

[Jason Levine]

I find that local backups are better than cloud backups. I have a 1TB external hard drive that's nearly filled up. This drive cost me around $100 a few years ago. To get 1TB of backup from Google, for example, I would need to pay $9.99 a month. So I can either pay $120 yearly for 1TB of storage space or I can buy a new hard drive every year with increasing disk space. (Currently, $120 will get me a 3TB external hard drive.) With two of the drives, I can have one located somewhere "off-site" in case something happens to the location of my primary hard drive (fire, theft, etc).

Don't get me wrong, cloud backups can be useful. I can have my phone auto-backup photos and videos to the cloud which is helpful in case something happens to my phone. It also means I don't need to worry about backing up my phone as often. Still, for the most part, I've found local backups to be easier to manage and less expensive than cloud backups.