Originally posted by: TonyPearson
Rich Bourdeau has written a nice article on InfoStor titled [
Software as a Service (SaaS) meets Storage]. Last year, IBM acquired Arsenal Digital, and he mentions both in this article.It is interesting how this has evolved over the years.
- Rent warehouse space for tapes
I remember when various companies offered remote storage for tapes. These would be temperature and humidity-controlledrooms, with access lists on who could bring tapes in, who could take tapes out, and so on. In the event of thedisaster, someone would collect the appropriate tapes and take them to a recovery site location.
- Rent online/nearline storage from a Storage Service Provider (SSP)
SSPs rented storage space on disk, or provided automated tape libraries that could be written to. With tapes being ejected and stored in temperature/humidity-controlled vaults. Electronic vaulting eliminates a lot of theissues with cartridge handling and transportation, is more secure, and faster. Rented disk space, based on a Gigabytes-per-month rate, could be used for whatever the customer wanted. If these were for backups or archive,then the customer has to have their own software, to do their own processing at their own location, sending the data to the remote storage as appropriate, and manage their own administration.
- Backup-as-a-Service and Archive-as-a-Service
We are now seeing the SaaS model applied to mundane and routine storage management tasks. New providers can offerthe software to send backups, the disk to write them to, and as needed the tape libraries and cartridges to rollover when the disk space is full. Disk capacity can be sized so that the most recent backups are on immediately accessible for fast recovery.
The same concept can be applied to archives. The key difference between a backup and an archive is that backups areversion-based. You might keep three versions of a backup, the most recent, and two older copies, in case something is wrong with the most recent copy, you can go back to older copies. This could be from undetected corruption of the data itself, or problems with the disk or tape media. An archive, on the other hand, is time-based. You want this data to be kept for a specific period of time, based on an event or fixed period of years.
Since BaaS and AaaS providers know what the data is, have some idea of the policies and usage patterns will be, can then optimize a storage solution that best meets service level agreements.
This has certainly come a long way!
technorati tags: SaaS, IBM, storage, Arsenal Digital, BaaS, AaaS, backup, archive, disk, tape, electronic vaulting