Hot on the heels of Amazon removing the Beta tag and releasing Amazon EC2 for production, we are excited to announce the Beta release of Vembu StoreGrid Cloud AMI, which facilitates deploying StoreGrid in Amazon cloud computing infrastructure. This has been a long pending demand from our partner base, who are MSPs, VARs and IT Solution providers offering online backup services using StoreGrid.
StoreGrid Cloud AMI Beta is available for both Microsoft Windows Server and CentOS Linux Server. Also, the StoreGrid backup server uses the MySQL 5.0 database. All these are bundled together in the StoreGrid Cloud AMI to facilitate ease of deployment for our partners. Of course, we are working on lot more automation as we try to move into production release before the end of 2008.
Why is StoreGrid Cloud AMI relevant for our partners?
Our primary target market segment is Small and Medium Businesses. Considering the growing complexity of IT infrastructure it is our strong belief that it is not easy for software vendors to directly service SMB customers. Close proximity to the customer is extremely important when you service SMB customers. Hence the local VAR or an MSP is in the best position to provide IT services to a small and medium business customer. This is especially relevant when it comes to data backups and more specifically online backups. As we work with large number of partners servicing different types of small and medium businesses with different sets of requirements, it is an absolute must that any IT product or solution we build should provide the maximum flexibility when it comes to deployment options or other relevant functionality.
Given this context, we have always focused on giving as much choice to our partners as they go about augmenting their business with an online backup service powered by StoreGrid. Specifically, as cloud computing as a framework gains momentum, as an aspiring leader in the online backup category, we recognize the need to provide the choice of deploying StoreGrid in a leading cloud computing infrastructure – and nothing beats Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 for a start.
Moreover, for the last two years we have primarily worked with partners who are willing to host StoreGrid in their own data center and offer online backup services to their customers. Many of our prospective partners had expressed interest in having a solution which they can host in a cloud computing environment like Amazon EC2/S3. With the release of StoreGrid Cloud AMI, we are responding to a long under-served market demand.
With StoreGrid Cloud AMI, any IT solution provider (MSPs, VARs) can now start an online backup service without any capital investment. All they have to do is to get an account in Amazon Web Services, instantiate an instance of StoreGrid Cloud AMI, create and mount the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume as a backup storage and start offering online backup service to their customers. It is as simple as that. The backup data stored in Amazon EBS is periodically backed up as a snapshot to Amazon S3 for redundancy. On top of this partners who require another level of redundancy can instantiate StoreGrid Cloud AMI as a replication server and replicate the backup data to another Amazon EBS volume. This again can be backed up as a snapshot to Amazon S3.
Our existing partners or partners who prefer to deploy StoreGrid in their own data center can now use Amazon cloud infrastructure as a redundant storage for the backup data in their data center. All they have to do is to deploy StoreGrid Cloud AMI as a Replication Server in Amazon EC2 and configure their internally deployed StoreGrid backup server to replicate the backup data to the StoreGrid replication server running in Amazon EC2.
As I said, choice and flexibility of deployment is what we provide our partners. To summarize, with StoreGrid, our partners now can offer an online backup service in the following ways:
1. StoreGrid backup server and StoreGrid replication server deployed in their own data center with their own local storage.
2. StoreGrid backup server and StoreGrid replication server in Amazon EC2 with Amazon EBS volume as the mounted storage. And for additional redundancy data in the EBS volume is backed up as a snapshot to Amazon S3 storage.
3. StoreGrid backup server deployed in their own data center with local storage and StoreGrid replication server deployed in Amazon EC2 with Amazon EBS volume as the mounted storage for the replication data. Again for additional redundancy data in the EBS volume is backed up as a snapshot to Amazon S3 storage.
4. Another deployment which is also popular amongst some partners is to deploy StoreGrid backup server on-premise in the end customer location so that there is local copy of the backup data for quick restores. And these partners can now deploy StoreGrid Cloud AMI as a replication server and replicate the on-premise backup server to the Amazon EC2 deployed replication server.
You can learn about more technical details on using the StoreGrid Cloud AMI at http://www.vembu.com/storegrid/amazon-ec2-s3-cloud-online-backup.html
The above post was written by Sekar Vembu of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.
