Can you afford not to use cloud-based data protection?

Post by Al Perlman

The latest round of the Quantum-sponsored event series Virtualization, Cloud and The New Realities for Data Protection is coming to a close on Thursday evening with the final event in King of Prussia, Pa. If you are in the Philadelphia area or otherwise within reach, it is an event definitely worth attending, particularly if you have any questions about data protection and the cloud. And, face it, if you are in IT today can you afford not to have questions about data protection and the cloud?

The two latest meetings in St. Louis and Portland, OR, earlier this week have been enlivened by the recent introduction of Quantum’s Q-Cloud, which enables customers to purchase business-class backup and recovery solutions as a service-based subscription model. There are several key aspects of Q-Cloud that have been gathering the interest of participants at the event, notably:

• Pricing: Depending upon your configuration and features such as deduplication, your backup storage costs with Q-Cloud could be as low as a penny a gigabyte per month, which is unprecedented for the performance and peace of mind enabled for business-class backup and recovery solutions.

• Simple Integration: Q-Cloud integrates seamlessly with existing solutions without the need for any modifications. This is critical for IT and storage professionals looking to reduce complexity and it enables organizations to have a broader range of fully integrated solutions for all of their various storage requirements.

As the event series has moved across the country, participants all over the U.S. have talked about the costs involved in data protection and have been looking for ways to minimize costs while maximizing data safety. An advantage of taking an approach that incorporates Q-Cloud as part of an overall strategic storage solution, is in helping IT to manage data based on its value to the organization, particularly for backup and recovery. By using an inexpensive cloud-based solution for backup and archiving, organizations can save money on what would perhaps go towards disk and tape libraries, while having the peace of mind that they can easily get to their data if and when they need it.

“One of the big things we’re talking about at these events is to look at your environment and avoid treating all of your data the same,” says Greg Schulz, the widely respected storage analyst who has been the keynote speaker at all of the events in the series. Schulz, the founder and senior advisor at The Server and StorageIO Group (StorageIO), says organizations deploying a cost-saving tool such as Q-Cloud can address other issues within their storage infrastructure. “Budgets are definitely a factor,” he says. “We are seeing that people can use the savings derived from removing complexity and more effective data protection and reinvesting in infrastructure to support continued growth and improvements.”

Saving money – or spending less money – on backup and recovery will be critical as organizations cope with ever increasing amounts of data. If you look at some of the market research on how quickly and massively data is growing, it is absolutely mind-boggling. One of the studies I like to quote comes from Smithsonian Magazine: By next year we will be generating as much data as was produced in the entire history of mankind from the beginning of time to 2003 – and we will be producing that amount of data every 10 minutes. The more organizations can save on backing up that data – savings not just in costs but also in complexity, space and manpower – the better off we will all be in dealing with data as it just keeps growing and growing and growing.

What’s next? Well, as noted, there is one more event in the series, which means we’ll have one more blog post to wrap things up. Stay tuned early next week for our final post in this series. In the meantime, check out the latest information on Q-Cloud.