Build Your Own Private Cloud Storage

Many small and medium businesses are doing at least some storage in the public cloud, especially with disaster recovery in mind. But you still need at least some storage locally. You can go with a SAN (Storage Attached Network) that is expensive and complicated or you can consider something much easier and simpler.

That something is a Drobo storage system. Drobo, which sounds like a good name for a robot, is a deceptively advanced hard disk storage solution that uses standard 3.5” SATA disk drives of pretty much any capacity. The deceptive part is that this appears to be just some simple multi-bay drive case. You can plug in more drives at any time. You can pull drives out at any time. You can even pull out a 1 TB drive and replace it with a 2 TB drive at any time.

Sounds convenient, but what kind of administrative nightmare lies behind swapping all those drives in and out. None at all. It’s truly plug and play... or I should say plug and store. You don’t have to log into any admin panel and start typing arcane command lines to make things work. All of that is automated and invisible to you, the user.

You are, indeed, building your own private storage cloud and it stays on your premises. There’s no worry about having sufficient bandwidth to access data in real-time because this unit sits on a desk or mounts in a rack and connects to your local network.

You are no doubt familiar with RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives), a technique of interconnecting multiple hard drives so that the failure of one drive will not cause you to lose data. Drobo’s system goes even farther. They call it BeyondRAID. The difference is that with Drobo you can use drives of any size and they don’t have to be the same. Grab half a dozen SATA drives at random and plug them into the Drobo box. The system automatically sets them up for redundant storage with the combined capacity being your storage pool. It’s not a matter of the smallest disk defining the storage pool or virtual hot spare.

You can see how this is similar to the cloud philosophy in that you don’t need to be concerned about the mechanics of how to get all those disparate disk drives to work in harmony. That’s built into the operating system. If you start to run out of room, just plug another drive into an empty bay. Oh, your bays are all full? OK. Just yank out the smallest drive and replace it with a larger one. The system will automatically accommodate the drive change, give you the extra capacity and not lose any information in the process.

You can even upgrade the drive system at will. Move up from a 9 bay system to a 12 bay system for up to 24 TB of local storage. Pull your drive out of the old case and plug them into the new one. Oh, oh. You forgot which drive was in which slot? No problem. Just plug them into any open slot, include any new ones wherever there is room and you are good to go. The status lights will all light green when the system has sorted things out and is ready to use.

Does this sound a bit too simple to be true? Well, you’ll just have to read the material and watch the demonstration videos to see for yourself. Drobo units start at just 4 bays for small office use (with however many drives you care to plug in) and go up from there.

Note: Photo of open hard disk drive courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Fiber Optic Bandwidth For Remote Backup

Most companies have or should have a plan for protecting their valuable data against disaster. Simple disk and tape backups may protect against a crashed PC or server, but offer little or no protection when you get hit with fire, flood, tornado, hurricane or earthquake. For this reason, offsite is the way to go for data backup.

The question become how far away is safe and what do you need to efficiently transfer data. The data center across town will save you if your building catches fire, but won’t do much when an F5 tornado levels the entire town or the levee breaks and everything submerges. You need to get to a different geographical area where the threats are different than where you are now. Tornados aren’t likely to hit Denver and Biloxi at the same time. A big earthquake may shake San Francisco, but it’s not likely to be shaking Chicago at the same time.

Corporations with regional offices are well situated to back each other up. You may want to consider having each office back up data for a couple of other offices hundreds or thousands of miles away. It’s a lot of data flowing, but if one office gets taken out, you’ve got the data in at least two other places.

Having geographically diverse locations back up each other’s data fits well with the network topology you need anyway. Certainly, you want all of your locations to be able to communicate. Some companies do this through a private star network centered on their headquarters location. Others use a mesh network based on MPLS with each location connecting to the nearest POP in their city. That’s more robust because there is no single point of failure like you have with HQ coordinating all the traffic.

What you need for data backup is bandwidth and lots of it. With dedicated line services you are paying for the full capacity even though the lines mostly sit idle after hours. Those are the traditional times that IT departments do data backups anyway. You can load your lines to the max to transfer data files without affecting other business operations if you do this in the wee hours.

Other companies like the idea of data mirroring. This is a real time process that keeps two or more copies of a data set completely synchronized at different locations. The advantage is that you can recover almost instantly when you lose a facility. The tradeoff is that you’ll need much higher bandwidth levels than for backup file transfers that can take their time overnight.

What type of bandwidth is available to support your backup or mirroring needs? Most likely you’ll want fiber optic connections, although smaller organizations may get by with 100 Mbps Ethernet over Copper where it is available. Otherwise you’re looking at traditional SONET services that include OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-48 at 2.49 Gbps or OC-1921 at 9.95 Gbps. A good alternative is Carrier Ethernet service that is highly scalable and includes popular speeds such as 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) and 10,000 Mbps 10 Gigabit Ethernet ( 10 GigE).

Both SONET and Ethernet are widely available for long haul connections through competitive fiber optic carriers, plus last mile connections to high bandwidth MPLS networks with a regional or nationwide service footprint. Which topology you pick depends on how many locations you want to interconnect and how the pricing works out. Ethernet tends to be less expensive than SONET in most situations and MPLS networks have the advantage of offering more bandwidth at lower costs than most dedicated lines.

Fiber optic connections are also valuable if you are getting your storage in the cloud, as many companies are now doing. The advantage of cloud storage is that it gives you the geographical diversity you require, the security of a major data center and nearly unlimited resources as your data storage needs change. You’ll also avoid the capital expense and staffing required to run your own data centers.

Are you in need of robust high bandwidth connections to support your data backup and mirroring needs? If so, get pricing and availability of SONET and Ethernet fiber optic bandwidth services now. You may also wish to explore cloud storage options as another approach to disaster protection and recovery.



Note: Data center photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Online Photo Storage Offers Protection

Digital photography has reduced the incremental cost of taking photos to near zero. But the value of the photos themselves remains, as ever, what they mean to the photographer. That can range anywhere from trivial to priceless. Why take a chance that you'll lose an image you can't replace when protection is so very cheap?

The usual way we protect our electronic images is by copying them from camera to computer hard drive. Then by making a backup copy on CD ROM or DVD ROM. You might even make an extra copy on a USB solid state drive for both protection and portability. These methods ensure that you don't accidentally erase your photos. But they're inadequate to protect from other disasters. A fire or tornado strikes with little warning and can destroy computers, backup disks, solid state drives and other local storage facilities in one fell swoop.

For an extra layer of protection, consider online picture storage. This is just what it sounds like. You upload your photos to a remote site where a redundant copy is kept. When you want one or more files back, you download it.

Sure, you can accomplish pretty much the same thing by making multiple CD ROMs of your photos and sending one copy to a relative, sending it to a far away plant site, or putting it in a safe deposit box. But, in practice, how rigorous are any of us in keeping up with this. Chances are that you'll have at least some recent pictures that reside only on your PC hard drive and nowhere else. They've already been deleted from the camera to make room for more photos.

In addition to having a remote site to back things up to, it's also valuable to have software that takes care of the back-up process automatically. That way forgetfulness is removed from the equation. Your files are safely squirreled away without you having to think about it.

Another nice feature is encryption. That's not always so important for snapshots, but what works for pictures also works for personal data files of all sorts. By encrypting the files during upload and download and then encrypting them on the remote disc, you've got protection against hackers and other snoops.

All of these features are available from Mozy Online Backup. The personal entry level product offers free backup software and 2 GB of remote storage gratis. You don't even need a credit card to take advantage of this service. If you decide you want more than 2 GB, you can get unlimited personal online storage for pictures, music and data files for $4.95 a month.

For business users there's an upgrade called MozyPro. This service is available with licenses for anywhere from a few to as many seats as you need. There's also a MozyPro for Mac computers as well as PCs, and both Windows and Mac servers.

Regardless of whether you're an occasional amateur or dedicated professional photographer, consider the low cost protection option of online picture storage with Mozy backup services.

Store Your Files For Free

The economy's rough. So the price you want to store is files is free, right? Of course that's the right price in this environment. Anything else would be too much.

Well, free it is. At least for storing your personal files. Now mind you, this means electronic files. Warning: don't haul your cardboard boxes full of paper files to one of those self-storage building places and ask for free service. They'll sic their junkyard dogs on you.

Instead, store your computer files free with Mozy. All you do is create an account, download a storage application file, and then upload your documents, photos, tunes or whatever from your computer. You don't need a credit card, because you aren't going to pay anything. That's what free means.

You like the idea of storing your files offsite. After all, hard drives crash, files get deleted and then you want them back later, and who knows what kind of damage computer viruses can cause. But perhaps you are concerned about having your files on someone elses server where they might be found by others. Mozy addresses this. They use 128-bit SSL encryption to upload your files and keep them secure during transit. When they go into storage, your data is protected by 448-bit Blowfish encryption. That should keep the hackers at bay.

The other beauty of this Mozy service is that once you set it up, it works automatically. You tell it what time to do the backups and the system takes it from there. No more having to remember to do a Sunday night backup to CD ROM. No more sinking feeling when that disk gets damaged or you just can't remember where you stashed it. This service does the remembering so you don't have to.

Now one little caveat. The Mozy free file backup service is available for your home PC. You get 2 GB at no cost. For many users, this may be plenty. But if you like the way it works and want more, you can get unlimited backup for a small monthly fee.

Businesses are also in luck. There is a Mozy Pro service that offers desktop and server licenses for low monthly license fees plus a small amount per GB of storage per month. Price it out and compare with what it costs you to keep backup data spinning on hard drives or the cost and effort it takes to keep burning CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs. Don't forget that you really don't have a backup if your duplicate data is kept at the same facility as your online data. When disaster strikes, it all gets destroyed.

Mozy Pro can also help businesses and organizations comply with both the HIPAA privacy and HIPAA security rules, if those apply to you. There's helpful information about doing this available on the Mozy Pro website.