Storage OnLine Recovery Service Highlights
- The company is expanding from Ireland, through the UK to continental Europe through introducing recovery centres
- A long-term Symantec partner, the company uses Backup Exec (BE), Backup Exec Systems Recovery (BESR), Enterprise Vault (EV) and other offerings in its services
- It has always seen de-duplication as a way to offer online backup, but has been waiting for it to become cost effective to offer a solution
- Its Backup Monitor is offered as a SaaS offering
- It places an emphasis on recovery and in particular the ability to recover systems
- Its customers are mid-sized organisations with around 100 servers each
- It offers ‘quick ship recovery’ as well as ‘recovery to the Cloud’
- It sees Symantec’s inclusion of de-duplication, enhanced Disaster Recovery (DR) services, integrated archiving and the enhanced support for virtual agents as the major benefits of BE 2010
While attending a seminar at Symantec last week I had a chance to talk to Lewis McMahon, CEO of Storage OnLine – one of Symantec’s distribution partners for its BE and other software offerings. I thought I would be a good opportunity to see how this interesting service provider is developing its offerings for its customers. It is fascinating to see that, while its services to date have been mainly hands-on and location based, new software features will allow it to move more towards online, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing offerings in the near future.
Storage OnLine Is A Key Symantec Partner – Adding Value To Backup Exec Customers
Founded in 1999 to serve mid-sized companies in Ireland, the company has expanded in the last few years – opening its first recovery centre in Ireland in 2003, before three more in Dublin, Cork and Belfast in 2008 and two more in Manchester and London in 2009. It plans to open a number of other recovery centres in major capitals in Europe throughout 2010 and 2011.
Storage OnLine’s customers are mainly companies and organisations with up to 300 servers in both Public and Private sectors – more specifically local authorities, semi-state education, retail, pharmaceutical, manufacturing and engineering companies, or any – as Lewis puts it “typical Backup Exec house”. Its services are specifically targeted at Windows or Linux based servers, which for most organisations is the fastest growing element of their network.
It introduced a backup monitor offering in 2001 to facilitate the collation of multiple notifications across multiple backup servers – and across multiple domains. In 2002, Storage OnLine introduced a Disaster Recovery (DR) service to ensure that production systems could be recovered from their backups utilizing Bare Metal Recovery. Lewis states that in 2006, the combination of Symantec’s BESR and virtualisation revolutionised its ability to offer a DR service by allowing the company to completely recreate a customer’s network from its backups, without the need to reinstall an operating system or an application.
Storage OnLine Has Offered Recovery Services, Not Online Storage To Date – But This Might Be about To Change
Intriguingly, despite its name, the company has never yet actually offered online storage to its customers, concentrating instead on an expanding portfolio of data, application and systems recovery services. It has discovered that over 90% of organisations still utilise tape as part of their backup strategy, so tape remains the most cost effective and the most common method for customers to transfer data to the Storage OnLine recovery centres. However at the enterprise level, de-duplication (as introduced through BE 2010) will now offer the company and its customers a cost-effective alternative to tape. Symantec introduced the ‘2010’ version of BE at the end of January 2010.
Your Backups Are Only As Good As Your Ability To Recover
Lewis points out that the only reason we backup is to provide us with the ability to recover, commenting “Half of the manual deals with recovery, but most people only get to read this part when they need to do a recovery, at which point it may be too late, as the backups may not be good enough to facilitate a recovery.” He breaks recovery down into three categories – items of data, individual systems and entire sites. From personal experience I know how important ‘testing the restore’ is to backup processes (and how not testing it can make recovery very time consuming – if not impossible -when things go wrong). Having lost data as a result of faulty backup procedures has forced me to plan for recovery, rather than just backup.
When most people think of DR, the first thing that comes into their heads is the major natural disaster. Yet according to Lewis, natural disasters, account for just 3% of all disasters scenarios. Human error (32%), viruses (7%) and software corruption (14%) account for over half of all disasters and must be recovered from an historical backup as replication will only replicate the issue to the DR site.
Storage Protection & Recovery Service
Backups represent the starting point for most organisations considering a DR strategy. The downside is that they only offer a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of hours – or maybe ‘never’ if the backup is not good enough to facilitate the recovery of the system. The introduction of regular recovery testing and archiving can considerably reduce the RTO at minimal cost and should be considered for most servers. For many organisations, DR site replication can prove very expensive and therefore should only be considered for the most critical systems. Furthermore, immediate failover of systems to a DR site in the event of a major disaster may prove fruitless if nobody can connect to those systems.
Lewis reports a relevant story about a data centre fire in London from a recent VMWare conference; despite the IT management team recovering the systems to a DR site in the Docklands within 18 hours, it then took three weeks to connect anyone to it, as all of the desktops needed to be replaced. Clearly organisations need to design of DR processes that stretch beyond servers to cover the entire IT systems including client devices.
Lewis believes that virtualisation has played an important role in his company’s DR Service as it facilitates the recovery of an entire network from scratch within hours. For those organisations whose budgets do not allow for a dedicated DR site, it provides an extremely cost effective way to put a DR plan in place.
Because of the ability to recover an entire system, the Storage OnLine DR service enables the recovery of an organisation’s network to any point in time, thereby ensuring that data from a legacy system can be recovered. For example, organisations with older backups of say, a Microsoft Exchange 5.5 Information Store, would be unable to recover the Information Store without first rebuilding the Exchange 5.5 server to the same specification as when the backup was taken. The Storage Online service ensures the ability to recover both system and data, thereby allowing the data to be recovered immediately.
The company’s managed backup and recovery Services involve four elements, which are:
- Auditing the customer’s existing backup strategy – Storage OnLine tests the recovery of 1000’s of servers every year and, as a result, is expert at configuring backups. Its first step is to audit the customer’s existing backup strategy and provide recommendations on how to facilitate the recovery of their network from any potential disaster.
- Configuring – It integrates with the customer’s existing backup infrastructure to facilitate the backup and recovery of individual systems or even an entire site.
- Monitoring and supporting backup jobs according to the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) agreed – see below about how the company’s Backup Monitor helps here
- Regular Recovery Testing to a Storage OnLine recovery centre to ensure that the customer’s entire network can be recovered in the event of a disaster
Lewis claims his company offers the service at “less than it would cost a customer to power its own DR site, let alone put in all the equipment and replication software”. The service itself is priced on a ‘per server/per year’ basis, with physical servers at £1k for the first year, dropping to £500 per year subsequently and virtual servers at £300 and £150 respectively.
Storage OnLine’s Backup Monitor – A SaaS Offering
Lewis gave us an interesting demonstration of his company’s Backup Monitor application, which can collate notifications across multiple backup servers – and across multiple domains. It allows you to drill down graphically from a ‘systems’, all the way to an ‘individual task’ view of the backup status of an organisation. This application/service is available as a SaaS purchase to both end users with multiple sites and partners who wish to monitor their customers’ backups, but is also an integral part of the company’s managed backup service.
Some Conclusions – Storage OnLine Offers Either Quick Ship Or Cloud-Based Recovery
In my view Storage OnLine’s services are very practical in that they ensure that their customers can restore data, systems, or entire sites from their backups as appropriate and when necessary. They add value to an organisation’s existing investment, regardless of whether the organisation backs up to tape, to disk or to disk and tape.
The distributed nature of its recovery centres facilitates the quick shipment of equipment to a customer site in the event of a disaster. It also protects against a single point of failure due to a major disaster in a single location, as the recovery centres are geographically dispersed. Equally customers can connect into the recovery centre in the event of a disaster. The company also utilises Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to facilitate workplace recovery.
Lewis believes that, with the introduction of cost effective de-duplication, Storage OnLine will at last be able to offer online storage at a reasonable cost, thereby completing its status as a Cloud Computing company. For me this will be an important move. As with a handful of other service suppliers I have interviewed, this supplier has a deep knowledge of an important business process (in this case backup and recovery) – advances in software (in this case Symantec’s) will allow it to expand from location-based to Cloud-based services. In consequence it should be able to multiply its customer base substantially.