 cloud-based backup at their site but also become the recovery site have you looked at any of those and have you thought about recovering your applications in the cloud is that possible or not possible for you it it may be possible it was a technology that that I'm not I actually wasn't even familiar that that it was available yet people using the cloud for for their primary storage and lit eliminating fans in their data center it sounds it sounds fabulous it almost sounds too good to be true if I understood the question John is that right is that what you were asked that's right primary store as essentially enabling right right now UV motion you you you can recover your applications but do you view motion between the two data centers today no we don't the only thing that that secondary data center does is log on authentication for their local server the local virtual machine there that does authentication and printing print services the other the only other purpose for the equipment there is for DR what about our PO we talked about our TO what about the recovery point objective is that something that you've looked at or have sensitivity to I mean how much data you willing to lose I mean we do a fair amount of a CYA from a paper perspective so I don't think that that is going to be as critical to to have you know up to the minute data we if we went back to yesterday and had to manually key in you know the data we lost it would be most it'd be transactions from your reps in the field are here right things like that are your customers entering orders online or not we do have an internal e ordering system so there may be a potential where they would have to rekey their orders the nice thing with the system though as they get a printout when they when they place their order so that can be okay as well okay okay I can ask about your your your current storage vendor did they offer any services through local vals or service providers that would it would allow you a two-phase type solution and some back up to their site and then from that the cloud well HP does offer cloud service there they're one of my primary storage providers my other primary storage providers a company called Co-rade and they recently released a product called Easter cloud I don't know anything about it yet other than the name extra grid the backup appliance that I have right now I'm supposed to be talking with their product roadmap lead Mark Crespi in the next couple of days later on this week actually he and I are going to be speaking about what their plans are to offer some sort of cloud services really anxious to hear what what he has to say given that I mean in my mind the most volatile market to be and is a backup primary storage given the the enablement of the existence of the cloud I mean I think primary backup storage appliance vendors need to have some sort of a cloud offering if they're going to remain competitive in the market but did you ever look at the company called the Yoda bite Yoda bite what you why OTA be YTE what do they offer they offer a knock I don't know if they're online or not but they offer a a service in the cloud basically a method of providing a cloud support for that that's they're a fairly new company so I don't know how you feel about that but they just come out of stealth basically the one thing that seemed to be a recurring theme with the different providers is to try to keep it as close to being local as possible given that I'm up in northern Vermont local for me is maybe the Boston area I found a company called Zeta grid that actually sounded like they had exactly what I needed when I looked into it a little bit further I found out that they were based out of Australia so there went that idea given their given their location the the latency would have just been awful but you know given given that I'm looking for archiving maybe that is a viable solution I I don't know I mean I can't dismiss it completely but proximity to the to the to the cloud storage provider is a consideration of the needs to be made yeah I mean that was my reason for asking about you all your current storage providers and an exit grid because they would seem to be the obvious candidates for providing that service and a number of them do it through local local bars you know providing the interim interim translation from from their product to the cloud that would be my my hesitation though with the Yoda service that you mentioned the Yoda right now that would be my presentation there with them being a startup I'd have to know where they were located Paul how much if at all does the cost of the backup software impact your backup strategy you said you're a Veeam customer today for you right I would like to continue to use to use Veeam for my backup software there's a lot of things that they do very very well so I want to make sure that I continue to partner with them and take advantage of their product and how do they license they license on a per server per VM basis what what is it per socket per socket so frequently we talk about a backup window is there a sort of DR window that you've got a got a hit and and or does that pose any limitations to you in terms of the time the time allowed for D or necessarily DR window with the exception being that since today my DR facility is a production location and we've got folks that are there that are trying to use computers out there I mean I can't use all available band with the stream DR data out to the location that would be the okay what so how much bandwidth do you have available I've got I've got five megabits between locations and I just I just increased our our our WAN link to the internet to 20 20 megabits okay and so and the the amount of daily transfer between the two sites so the you know the new data that you transfer between the two sites is approximately I couldn't tell you right now I mean we've got six servers that were that we're sending the DR data across but again that's that's turned right down to the bare minimum if I had to design this from the beginning you know and and bandwidth and space was not a concern there wouldn't be six servers that were sent over there would be more than that right yeah what's what's the risk that you are exposed to by not backing up all the servers what's the biggest issue for you there the person that takes my place is going to have to to rebuild service level servers they're going to have to to find and read download software installations license keys things that I've collected over the years to try to make my job a little easier in addition the email server lives over here right now I can't remember if that's one of the ones that I'm sending over and it may be actually but they would be service level so anti-virus servers update servers so we're talking days to days to a week or more to sort of recover everything back to to I all of it would be recoverable I mean some of the stuff are little scripts that you know at some time I've written to what to make a job easier that I've saved a lot of the stuff though would be would be retrievable it would just take quite a lot of time and a lot of effort okay I want to just make sure anyone else have any questions on the phone so just being very basic here I mean the methods that's been used for umpteen years is just take a tape and throw it over the transom to to one of the un-mountains or other providers of that is is that within your budget is is that something that you could do if you couldn't find another solution what was the what's the what's the alternative you're laughing at tape why are you laughing because because of the technology that I that I happily did away with a number of years ago it's been the Achilles heel of the IT industry for years as far as I'm concerned I've hated tape so secret anybody that's ever met me and spoke to me or work with me I've hated tapes in the beginning it's unreliable CRC errors gosh I used to have to to to make nine-hour drives out to to remote offices to to work for an hour to change a defective that drive thank you HP it's just not a direction that I'm willing to go again it really would feel like I'm in the field of technology and and advancement and moving forward and and to to do anything even archiving which there's a lot of him I mean I'm not selling this but I'm there is a lot of improvement with LTO fix and and the ability to index the tapes and the quality of those products these days they've improved quite dramatically in the last few years I'm just wondering you know if you couldn't find a cloud solution would you be forced into something like that for on a temporary basis why while you while you waited for the market to to to mature I think we heard over my dead body is actually well if I couldn't no no actually it would be over my newly purchased the nas device because there's just no way that I go down the tape the tape wrote again how about I wonder if we go back to glacier for a minute and a lot of questions folks had that remained unanswered and I wonder if you in your research are able to find out so the big question is how is Amazon able to get down to such a price point and is it some kind of subsidy or are they actually spinning down the discs to reduce power that's what a number of people surmised using some kind of ODM product or some kind of specialty disc product do you know Paul have you heard or learned in your discussions and your research how Amazon you know gets down to that price point I wouldn't say that it's so much of spinning down discs although maybe maybe after a period of time that's exactly what they do my understanding is that initially when you back up to their service like like many of the other services they make many many many many copies of your data spreading it throughout their data center data centers in the event of a failure somewhere else your data is still going to be accessible and that's one of the one of the things that they along with the other cell is that you don't have to have you know a retention policy or you don't have to have snapshots because we we create all that we take care of all that stuff for you the folks that are using cloud services for primary storage that those folks are saying but you don't even have to have a backup system in place because because we do all these snapshots and all the stuff for you but the as far as how they how they get the cost down maybe maybe they do all this stuff up front when they get your stuff and then they and then they and then they start spinning down this I'm not really sure I don't have an answer for that there's just a lot of I mean I could speculate for hours on how they but the but the penny a penny a gigabyte per month is only the storage cost it's not the it's not the transfer cost it's not it's not the put cost it's not the get cost and it's not the network cost wouldn't be any get cost because that's that's any solution only provides you the archiving the long long-term archiving piece of it right so as yours as you're going through your analysis or have you created some sort of comparison document to a spreadsheet to to look at what the real cost is on each of these options yeah I think you I think I think we I think you know what tell you what let's build that together and let's put it on the wiki bond site okay and and then we can have all the suppliers fill in their numbers I I I think it's a great idea so Dave let's get that going what do you think I mean this is David flyer again I mean obviously part of the part of your selection criteria is confidence in the supplier and and and presumably you want the ability to to move be able to move between suppliers so and and seeding the data and moving the data between sites is one of the big big issues here isn't that you've uncovered do you have any thoughts on that on on on how you were protect yourself from somebody going bankrupt or from just needing to move it because that Amazon just suddenly move it up to 10 cents per gigabyte per month those are definitely things that need to be considered you know and in the case of the the new startup that would definitely be a concern of mine going with a brand new provider and as opposed to somebody who's a larger you know widely known name like Amazon that would that would definitely be a concern for me and and it will weigh heavily on what about the we touched on their retrieval costs so and and you stated up front that your hope would be you never have to go get the data but in the case of a catastrophe you know the I've read some math at a three terabyte you know retrieval because Amazon let you retrieve I think five percent of their data a day so somebody did the math and it came out to about twenty two thousand dollars to retrieve three terabytes of data that was the what they posted so in the event of a catastrophic you know disaster is that something that you know management understands and would be prepared to to eat because it's it is a disaster so okay you got to write a check for twenty two thousand to get it all the data back but is that something that has that you've actually posed to management as a you know worst-case scenario and do you think they would swallow that I haven't posed that question directly I do think that they would swallow it because when I looked at what it would cost me to augment the existing exit grid physical appliance that I have today thirteen thousand dollars right so I mean whether I spent thirteen thousand today or twenty maybe ten years from now maybe if the meteor maybe falls yeah so that's a it's a probability that you're going to have to spend that twenty two thousand over the next ten years you might have to spend it once over ten years versus the capex of thirteen thousand today thirteen thousand that you're gonna have to add to later on because all of a sudden we just ran out of storage again yeah and that's almost a certainty yeah each each upgrades last couple of years now right baby the the the last question I have is that you've got your current backup solution which you're you're happy with and there are other backup solutions which do have an interface for the cloud and I'm thinking of companies like a secret I don't know whether you've ever looked at those but they have a a a a a business model which allows local providers to provide that sort of service under their own under their own banner is that something you've looked at I mean that they are put fairly squarely position for the mid market and SMB I'm open for ideas I mean I've I've only been able to investigate a small handful of them if there are some out there that are better or offering anything different I'm all ears and certainly open to you know recommendations if anybody you know what my environment isn't what our needs are yeah one of the hopes out of today's what one of the hopes out of today's call was that we'd be able to provide with some input on directions that he should investigate directions he could go so it does sound to me like there's you know there's the archive cost but there's a bunch of stuff in the middle to get you to the to the archive and then there's significant cost to get it out of the archive so to the extent that you can impact either of those factors then I think it's it's an important so it's it's an important it's an important part of the decision-making process I would definitely talk to a secret now my understanding is David Floyd that a secret would power cloud service providers they wouldn't sell it directly unless you're building your own private cloud but they work with a number of cloud service providers a secret is a small business specialist and they've been around forever I think they're I know they're a Canadian based company but they sell to a lot of cloud service providers and have a very good reputation for cost effective cloud backup ASIGRA we have to meet with them last week a storage field day they were a pretty impressive I'd never heard of them because they're you know provider focus but they were pretty impressive the other one I think it's going to take a little more investigation and in the interest of disclosure I used to work used used to do some work with the company but it's a company called idara IDERA based out of Houston and and and they they provide a backup software product to backup basically applications in the cloud and so if you host your servers yeah yeah in in a hosting environment or or infrastructure as a service environment they're likely to be the backup supplier for that they're they've got like 275,000 customers servers that they're backing up today but I know they're going after the more enterprise environments now and so backing up from that to a cloud service provider might be an option so that's I will ask one of them to to comment on that so and so we'll try to get you some input there they just launched the new enterprise version today and the enterprise pricing today so well it sounds to me like we've got a lot of to-dos here so we so Paul you and I need to work together on this matrix for how to how to evaluate all of the factors in going to a cloud backup and then try to encourage all the vendors to to supply cost information we've got you help tease out a number of the factors that that maybe some of the other analysts had thought about but but I hadn't heard as much about so what I what I would encourage anyone who's on the call or or anyone who knows companies who've gone through this transition encourage people to contribute provide input feedback on on what we've learned today and what we hope to learn over the course of the next couple of weeks I want to thank I want to thank Scott Lowe David Florida Dave Vellante for joining me here today on the on the call as well as everyone else who's watching live on Silicon Angle TV and or who dialed in on the call today just as a reminder we'll have six research notes up on on wikibon.org over the course of the next couple of days so feel free to read contribute edit enhance the documents as we put them up there if you're not registered on wikibon.org it's a very simple registration process so please and Paul that includes you please please jump in and and edit contribute and and help the wikibon community so get Paul Martin IT manager at Poole & Grain we appreciate you being with us here today and expressing your challenges the and the approaches that you're looking at so also just want to remind you that in two weeks time we have our next peer insight will be discussed we'll have Dag Leodon who's chief technology officer at TapPad and the topic is optimizing infrastructure for analytics driven real-time decision-making so we're going to get moved from the SMB to the to to to big data here in the next two weeks so looking forward to that just also as a reminder we'll have a podcast of this research meeting up on I think Silicon Angle TV maybe on a YouTube channel on the wikibon channel on YouTube and a rebroadcast of the audio on on the in the peer insight archive so thanks for joining us here today John MacArthur peer insight moderate moderator wikibon thanks for joining us take care