Comments on: SpiderOak offers discount to Carbonite users, says SLAs on the way http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/spideroak-offers-discount-to-carbonite-users-says-slas-on-the-way/ A SearchStorage.com blog. Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:47:58 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: DavidFriend http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/spideroak-offers-discount-to-carbonite-users-says-slas-on-the-way/#comment-7428 DavidFriend Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:01:21 +0000 http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/?p=6352#comment-7428 Beth, You made some very useful points in your post. The idea of building up a large scale storage infrastructure from cheap generic PCs is foolish from both a technical and economic point of view. The Dell RAID6 storage servers that we use are 36 million times more reliable than an individual hard drive. These units, and similar units made by other storage vendors, have had millions of dollars of R&D put into them specifically to make them extremely reliable. If you are storing data on a regular PC, which is what it sounds like this other company is doing, you have a single point of failure. In addition, it would be worth knowing whether the data is stored on enterprise class disk drives, or the consumer-grade drives found in typical PCs. Dell and other storage server vendors won't even certify a consumer grade drive for use in their equipment. With the 15-drive RAID6 arrays that Carbonite uses, you would have to lose 3 of the 15 drives almost simultaneously before losing any data. These same storage servers are the backbone of corporate data centers the world over. I doubt that any home-brew configuration built up using standard PCs could even come close to the level of reliability that such servers offer. The real test of a vendor in this space is scalability. Carbonite currently has over 30 billion files backed up. We get over 100 million new files every day. To be able to receive data at those speeds and not lose any of it is a real an enormous technical challenge. The small vendors out there have no idea what they are getting into. Just about every small backup vendor has run into big problems as they scale, and it takes a lot of money. At least 5 online backup and storage vendors have folded in the last year, and I expect more will do so in the near future as the barriers rise. As for reliability, if you analyze the storage architectures of the two leading vendors in the consumer backup space, I think you would find both of the them compare favorably to the best run data centers in the world. Regards, Dave Friend, CEO Carbonite, inc. Beth,
You made some very useful points in your post. The idea of building up a large scale storage infrastructure from cheap generic PCs is foolish from both a technical and economic point of view. The Dell RAID6 storage servers that we use are 36 million times more reliable than an individual hard drive. These units, and similar units made by other storage vendors, have had millions of dollars of R&D put into them specifically to make them extremely reliable. If you are storing data on a regular PC, which is what it sounds like this other company is doing, you have a single point of failure. In addition, it would be worth knowing whether the data is stored on enterprise class disk drives, or the consumer-grade drives found in typical PCs. Dell and other storage server vendors won’t even certify a consumer grade drive for use in their equipment. With the 15-drive RAID6 arrays that Carbonite uses, you would have to lose 3 of the 15 drives almost simultaneously before losing any data. These same storage servers are the backbone of corporate data centers the world over. I doubt that any home-brew configuration built up using standard PCs could even come close to the level of reliability that such servers offer.

The real test of a vendor in this space is scalability. Carbonite currently has over 30 billion files backed up. We get over 100 million new files every day. To be able to receive data at those speeds and not lose any of it is a real an enormous technical challenge. The small vendors out there have no idea what they are getting into. Just about every small backup vendor has run into big problems as they scale, and it takes a lot of money. At least 5 online backup and storage vendors have folded in the last year, and I expect more will do so in the near future as the barriers rise. As for reliability, if you analyze the storage architectures of the two leading vendors in the consumer backup space, I think you would find both of the them compare favorably to the best run data centers in the world.

Regards,

Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, inc.

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