Offsite backup storage solutions at commodity hardware prices
Folks in the UK are building storage boxes that could house up to petabytes of data using commodity hardware. Managed Service Providers can benefit from this cost-effective storage solution for their StoreGrid Backup or Replication servers.
This initially started as an effort by an online backup service provider to build cheap cloud storage for its own storage needs (thanks to them for sharing the design for those who wish to build their storage cost-effectively!). This has triggered a few hardware architects in the UK to explore building cheap storage options for service providers. Interested? They are taking orders for the storage cases.
Would be interesting to see how Managed Service Providers use these cost-effective storage solutions to cut down the cost of their off-site storage and replace it with their own. StoreGrid has partnered with leading storage technologies like the Amazon Cloud, Parascale and Caringo for the backup storage component of their online backup service.
Using StoreGrid, MSPs have a variety of options in setting up the backend for their service depending upon their customer needs.
1) Own servers in their data center / colo along with RAID drives / NAS storage devices / innovative storage pods as the one above for storage.
2) Amazon Cloud for running the backup service with StoreGrid running on EC2 instances (there’s a ready AMI with StoreGrid’s latest version pre-installed!) and Amazon’s S3 service for the storage. This option features unbeatable pricing for offsite storage.
3) Parascale or Caringo cluster software for setting up the storage backend for StoreGrid backup/replication servers
4) Hybrid options using a combination of the above. (E.g. on-premise backup server with data replication to the Amazon S3 service)
5) Locally attached drives in client machines for backups where you would like to have a copy available locally while having another copy in the backup server.
With so many cost-effective options, what are you waiting for?
The above post was written by Gokul Sriram 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.
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