Interviews

posted on 02 May 2008 15:12

Yosemite Technologies offers local backup servers to small and medium businesses who are being targeted by cloud backup service suppliers like Carbonite, IBM (Arsenal, )Mozy, Nirvanix and others. What does Yosemite think about the competing cloud backup services?

Blocks and Files talked to George Symons, Yosemite's CEO about this.

He has helped turn Yosemite around from the poor situation it was in, saying: "I've enjoyed my time here of a little over a year. It was definitely a turnaround but it has turned around. Now it's all about execution."

New pricing was introduced in December 07, with the notion of one backup server having unlimited clients. This has had the effect of raising Yosemite's ASP (average selling price). Also Yosemite is talking to bigger customers and: "getting a little higher in the market, which is great."

B&F: What do you think about backup over the Internet to a remote service provider, backup in the cloud as it is termed?

George Symons: "Today cloud backup and Yosemite are very different. Cloud backup is backup to disk. Yosemite is backup to disk and tape."

(Tapes can be taken offsite and disk backups can be replicated to a remote site via partners like DoubleTake.)

"With backups to the cloud you backup to a service provider. There are no local backup copies. I start to diverge here, strongly believing that you don't want to restore backups over the Internet. It's fine for backing up as you are trickling data out over a long period of time."

"For restore you want a local copy (because a large amount of data can be involved)."

B&F: Are cloud backup and local backup  opposed to one another?

George Symons: "I believe you need a hybrid approach; a local copy and an off-site copy. The cloud is a perfect place for that (off-site copy). It's good for both consumers and small business."

B&F: What about service levels?

George Symons: "If you backup to the cloud alone .... what about service levels? You don't hear much about it. If I'm a business I need to know they (the cloud backup service suppliers) are committed to a service level so I can get the databack. Most of the consumer (and small business) cloud backup suppliers don't offer this. It's unacceptable in the business market."

B&F: Would Yosemite partner with a cloud backup supplier to produce a hybrid solution?

George Symons: "It's technically possible. But the customer would only (want to) work with one backup product.So Yosemite's product would have a transparent back end."

B&F: Yes, it would be bad news if the cloud backup supplier had its own and different front end as part of a hybrid solution. Suppose there was a transparent, for example, Nirvanix backend that could be used, hypothetically that is?

George Symons: "Absolutely; that partnering makes a lot of sense."

Comment
This idea that George Symons has, of a hybrid approach with the local backup copy providing for fast restores and the remote, cloud copy providing the disaster-recovery-type backup and/or archive could be attractive.

A Yosemite FileKeeper front end could, in theory, be used to automatically backup client systems data onto a local backup storage facility. It could also have an integrated cloud backup function to send backup files off to a cloud supplier's remote storage facility as well. If the local copy was disk-based then such a transfer could be based on replication and de-duplication to reduce the bandwidth needs.

It would be more difficult with tape backups and, in fact, would probably be impractical.

For a cloud backup supplier the use of existing disk-based backup suppliers as a ready-made channel with thousands of customers ready to be upsold a backup cloud service on top of their local copy might well prove an attractive proposition.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}