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Again, like Maginatics, more patently obvious than Cloudscaling. The space of “Cloud Backup” is very interesting (and we have a lot of experience – remember, Mozy is an EMC company!) People initially think that “backup to Cloud” is an “obvious use case”. This is patently wrong. It’s not that there aren’t cases for backup to cloud. The assumption people make is that “public cloud object storage” is much “cheaper than on premise”. That’s not correct (see ECS as an example). It’s in the same band as local storage – but sucks when you compare with deduped (Data Domain) or god forbid, tape. There are other options (see deep cloud archive options), but in some cases, those even aren’t as compelling as they seem at first glance when you factor in WAN cost, and more horrifically – time to recover. This is why the only market where Backup as a Service is working is in the SMB markets where “on-premises” options have a “step-in” cost that’s much higher than a couple hundred a year. We’ve also seen “backup as a service” vendors that tried to make it “cheaper” than a few hundred bucks a year per a few hundred GB blow up as soon as their VC funding ran out. DR to cloud makes more sense. Backup to cloud – iffy. Yup – we’ve been watching closely for years. So – why Spanning? Why now? Spanning is VERY different than most “backup to cloud” services. They started with a very different design point: “don’t target backing up on-premise enterprise apps to the cloud – rather laser focus on apps already in the cloud. Namely, focus on the SaaS market, which is HUGE, growing like a ROCKET, and completely UNDERSERVED” That makes one sit up. Anyone who has used SDFC (and I do, and love it), or google apps knows that while their availability is great, there’s very little for recovery from user error. That’s what Spanning does, and better than anyone else. Check them out here! Plus – you’ve GOT to love their company culture :-) Spanning team – welcome to EMC, I can’t wait to meet you! |
