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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.
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.
Legally binding?
...which you should have backed up somewhere obviously, not only on a single cloud storage location
I thought the goal was to get your data back*, not to start a lawsuit.
*
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!
You missed the point of the article then.
What if your cloud service provider goes down? How you going to get all your data if you get only 1 day, or a week notice? How about if you get no notice, the shit just stops working? The company goes poof! So does all your data.
And you think that won't happen? Please, it is going to happen, sooner or later. Why do you think it's named The Cloud? Because clouds evaporate and disappear.
Be seeing you...
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Even if a large cloud provider were to get out of the business they are going to handle things in a responsible way and move their datacenter, hardware and data to someone else. And that's almost certainly true for the smaller players as well. That hardware and data is worth money even if not as much as it cost to buy. The bondholders are going to want $.60 on the dollar rather than $.00 on dollar if they can. But even if we assume that weren't true there are still options. Many of the colo companies which remember sell 30% of their space to the telcos are already using their cross connects for cloud-to-cloud moves the same way they do now for carrier-to-carrier. So for example from Equinix you can go between AWS, Azure and Verizon (Tarramark).
Almost all the small cloud players are renting space and will move data to physical drive or DAS or SAN. If they are growing broke just find out where they host, buy their hardware storage and keep it in the same colo your data is at now as a colo deal.
This is the sort of thing your cloud agent can handle for your company for free. I get that Joe-IT manager isn't plugged in enough to the industry to know whose hosting what where and what interconnects they have but that doesn't mean the data isn't readily available. This article is mainly just ignorant of how the industry works.
Why would you want it to die? What was the upside of company's having to constantly worry about hardware budgeting when they wanted to do software projects?
Yeah this. I can't find a source for this claim. According to Wall Street Journal, AWS' revenue is only a $1.2billion per quarter. It would have to be losing at least $500mil/quarter to make a $2 billion/yr loss. In other words, for every dollar you spend on AWS, they're really losing $.50 or so.
Amazon Web Services losing $2 billion a year