The Planet Blog

On Monday, Kevin touched on a pretty hot-button topic in our industry when he focused on the hype surrounding “The Cloud.” It reminded me of an interesting chart that plotted where various hosting technologies sit on the “hype cycle.”

Gartner, Inc. is the technology resource and advisory company that created the five-phase hype cycle to track new technologies. Because it’s much easier to understand each of the phases if you hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, take a moment to visit Gartner’s explanation of the five phases. Once you’re done there, come on back and we’ll take a look at a hosting-specific version of their hype cycle:

“The Cloud”

Cloud computing and cloud storage are hot and are getting hotter. With the Utopian promises of the cloud making every other hosting platform obsolete, Gartner places “Cloud” between the technology trigger and peak of inflated expectation phases. In its current incarnation, regardless of what you’ve heard, the cloud is not going to do your taxes, balance your checkbook or give you a massage. I’m pretty sure that you’ll hear that it can change your car’s oil and run a marathon for you before we hit the peak of inflated expectations for the technology, but don’t quote me on that yet.

In reality, cloud-based solutions are good for delivering on-demand services with utility-based billing. This is often misrepresented as being cheaper than dedicated alternatives, but the flexibility — of being able to use as much as you need one day and then dropping to zero the next — comes at a price. Your overall spend at the end of the month may well be less than a dedicated alternative, but your $/resource used may be more. If you have a relatively constant computing workload or storage needs, you will be better off with a dedicated device or a cloud product that offers discounts for commitments on usage.

Other important tenets of cloud services are scalability and elasticity. This means the ability to get as much as you need of a certain resource – whenever you need it – and then the ability to revert to your previous usage when the demand spike drops off. Elasticity – the ability to grow and shrink provisioned resources on the fly – is probably more important than scalability for most customers. Every cloud customer benefits from the on-demand management of provisioning additional resources to accommodate unanticipated traffic spikes, and very few will ever push the limits of the system.

Virtualization

Virtualization – the use of software to create independent virtual environments on a single server – is quietly falling from the peak of over-inflated expectations. We’ve realized that the virtualization model isn’t necessarily a complete game changer, but as we head toward the trough of disillusionment, we’re starting to see the real value it can bring.

Virtualization is a great enablement technology in achieving specific business goals: cost savings through higher utilization rates and resource consolidation – plus power and space savings – are achievable, as are cost-effective disaster recovery solutions. Not everyone can save money with virtualization. To begin, you need enough servers so when they’re consolidated, the virtualization technology spend is less than the cost of the decommissioned servers. In fact, a typical outcome is the infrastructure is made far more resilient because of the inherent values of virtualization – and costs don’t drop significantly … A good outcome overall, but not the panacea that was promised a few years back.

Hosting

While the dedicated hosting model has been around for a while, it’s still growing and evolving. As an offshoot of colocation, the model seemed pretty straightforward. One might assume that the hype has plateaued, but we’re still seeing flashes of enlightenment.

We’ve realized that hosting doesn’t just apply to Web servers, but is relevant to the rest of the back office. Multiple service levels have evolved in the hosted environment, so customers can choose exactly what they need – from completely self-managed dedicated servers to fully managed hosting solutions. Many who have long outsourced their Web hosting needs are starting to push email and collaboration applications to hosting providers. Email is a great example of an application well suited to hosting– while everybody needs email, does everybody need an email server or email administrator? Many hosting companies offer email as a service too, removing the need to even plan capacity on a single dedicated server.

Colocation

Colocation has found its groove, and we can safely say it’s on the plateau of productivity. It’s tough to misrepresent the expectations and the utility of the agreement: space, bandwidth and power to your server.

One sign that colo has found its place in the market is that we can easily define who it does suit: larger customers who own their equipment and have permanent IT staffs. It allows them to save money on data center acquisition and maintenance costs, while still allowing them to control over the infrastructure they desire. On the flip side, colocation is not necessarily suitable for a small shop with zero IT resources looking for regular maintenance assistance on a couple of Linux servers.

Caveat

Just because technologies like cloud and virtualization are apparently on their way to the trough of disillusionment doesn’t mean they are of any less utility than hosting or colocation … it’s just important to understand their popularity in the context of something like a hype cycle. Heck, we just released a storage cloud platform that is going to make hard drives obsolete.

Oh … did I just inflate expectations a little more?

-Rob

Over the last few days, you may have read about a server’s complete data loss that resulted in the demise of blog hosting provider Journalspace.

In their assessment of the disaster, Journalspace found they had been replicating data to a second hard drive in their server via RAID to provide both backup and disaster recovery abilities. The data disaster occurred when the data on the first drive disappeared: this condition was immediately replicated to the second drive, resulting in total data loss. In turn, Journalspace users lost all their blog entries, ultimately leading to Journalspace’s decision to close its doors for good.

Now, it’s very easy to point the finger and say that these guys should have had a better backup strategy in place, but I’ll leave that to the experts on Slashdot … I’m more interested in using this as a proof point for the many hosting customers I know who are in the same position or worse – considering the fact that many don’t have even a second hard drive. If you are in this category, please use this as a cautionary tale, and let it remind you that you need a proper backup solution to protect your business.

A common misconception is that “real” backup solutions are prohibitively expensive. While the costs of storage solutions were relatively high in the past, prices have come down dramatically in recent years, which makes backup products correspondingly cheaper. Today you can have your data backed up – off your server – starting at just $5 a month.

It takes just one of these potential data-loss instances to make years of investing in a backup solution worthwhile.

Naturally, my preference would be that you buy a backup solution from The Planet. We have a range of competitively priced products and services for any size company. But really, I would prefer that you buy a backup solution from anywhere rather than stay unprotected … after all, the survival of your business could depend on how you decide to back up your server.

-Rob

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed an interesting trend: “The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year … Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase.”

Moore was initially noting the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit at a relatively constant minimal cost. Because that measure has proven so representative of the progress of our technological manufacturing abilities, “Moore’s Law” has become a cornerstone in discussions of pricing, capacity and speed of almost anything in the computer realm. You’ve probably heard the law used generically to refer to the constant improvements in technology: In two years, you can purchase twice as much capacity, speed, bandwidth or any other easily-measureable and relevant technology metric for the price you would pay today and for the current levels of production.

While I never questioned these assertions, I can’t say that I really investigated to see if Moore’s Law actually held true in the world of storage, especially with regard to the two key storage characteristics: capacity and throughput. Sure, prices for the same technology get lower over time – we all know that – but that’s just because no one wants the old stuff, right? Does Moore’s observation about the doubling of transistor density actually relate to hard drive capacities? What about throughput rates?

Once I started looking into historical storage-related statistics, it became clear that Moore’s Law doesn’t completely explain the evolution of storage technology. The primary driver for hard drive capacity – the disk’s areal density – has been increasing at 60 percent per year (or around 1.6x every two years), so that key metric of storage appears to correlate with Moore’s transistor observation, but drive speeds and seek times have not improved in a similar exponential manner.

This dichotomy may seem a little strange, but I think capacity limitations have been a more significant problem for the industry as a whole than throughput rates, so drive manufacturers have thrown more of their R&D budgets into improving that key characteristic first. The proven, constant increase in storage capacity reflects a focus on meeting user demand for that storage capacity, and if the incremental value of an additional gigabyte of storage decreases, I think we’ll see a similar improvement in throughput rates as manufacturers turn their focus to that other key storage characteristic. Moore’s observation focused on manufacturing with the single goal of more transistors on an integrated circuit, so we can’t really say Moore’s Law “doesn’t apply” to storage since hard drive manufacturers have several key measurements to improve at a given time.

Thanks to the trend Gordon Moore recognized 48 years ago, we were recently able to drop the prices on several of our backup products. EVault Backup is now priced at $1 per GB, down from $2, and Network Backup product is now priced at 50 cents per GB, down from $1, and they are both free for 90 days. If you’re interested in learning more about our data protection and backup options, check out my “What is Data Protection?” blog or leave me your questions in the comments section here.

-Rob

In the past few months, our team worked tirelessly to prepare for the big launch on July 7. A new shopping cart, a new site design, a new managed hosting division, new advanced services … you know, the little things. I joined the team in the midst of this development and promptly made a contribution: We shouldn’t have a product line called Backup.

Bye Bye Backup? Absolutely Not.

Backups are infinitely valuable to all hosting customers, so I would never suggest that we eliminate the solutions enabling the backup of data. However, there is more to protecting data than just backing it up. Our goal, is to provide clarity around these data protection options so that our customers can select the best one for their company, that protects their data the way they need it protected. The data protection landscape can be pretty confusing, so it’s important for us to clarify where our products fit in the midst of all these hardware and software solutions that enable you to create and maintain full backups, partial backups, incremental backups, automated backups, disk images, and just about any other copy of data that you can imagine.

Data Protection

The goal of our data protection product line is simple: to protect customers’ data from accidental deletion or hardware/application failure. Each solution in the product line offers a different means to that end, so we renamed the product portfolio to better reflect the products’ goal. The Data Protection category encompasses traditional backup, continuous data protection, bare metal recovery and some disaster recovery abilities – and you’ll be seeing more products and services added soon.

Why do I need data protection? Doesn’t my storage protect my data?

Storage products generally have some level of data protection built in, such as RAID on disk arrays, and other redundant hardware and software features such as snapshots. These features protect your data from several types of events like component hardware failure in the device or if the data is corrupted by a user or application. So, yes, the storage system will protect your data – but not against every possibility, such as the device itself losing utility power or network connectivity. At that point, a copy of the data on another device — or better yet in another data center — is required. Designing a data protection strategy that solves the wide range of potential problems at an affordable price point can be a challenge.

Planet Alpha’s Data Protection Product Portfolio

Starting on the left side of the graph, you’ll see Network Backup (formerly known as NAS, or Network Attached Storage). Network Backup is purely storage space accessible over the network … we manage the storage hardware for your backups and you can access that space directly, through your own scripts or through third-party self-installed software.

To the right of Network Backup, you’ll see EVault™ Backup (formerly known as DiskSync). EVault™ Backup serves as a traditional backup product with software from a well-known vendor. In addition to the managed storage space provided by our Network Backup solution, the EVault™ software makes scheduling and maintaining regular backups of your data quick and easy.

Our Data Protection Server (formerly known as Dedicated Backup Server) uses R1Soft’s CDPServer software to regularly update and maintain iterative changes of data. Because the Data Protection Server maintains these block-level, up-to-the-minute changes, the software allows you to execute bare metal restores to recover your entire server.

To round out our current data protection product line, we introduced the ability to license and install R1Soft’s CDPServer software on your other servers in the event you don’t need a full dedicated server-worth of space.

Which Delivers the Most Value?

The beauty of this product portfolio is its flexibility to meet your needs, so the answer to the question for you depends on how much data you have to protect and how you want to do that. Network Backup is $1/GB, and EVault™ Backup is a little more expensive at $2/GB, as it includes backup software from EVault. Both these offerings are ideal for customers with less than 300GB of data to protect. Our Data Protection Servers are available in 4 capacities and start at $279 for the 500GB version, and the price per GB can be as low as $0.20/GB.

I’m a firm believer that everyone should have some kind of data protection. You might not need the backups all the time, but when you DO, the preparation pays off exponentially.

Limited Time: Backup Bonanza

With the new lineup of Data Protection products, we recently launched a great new promotion to enable all of our customers to try Network Backup and EVault™ Backup FREE for 90 days, and if you’re interested in the Data Protection Servers, you can cut the price significantly by ordering with promo code pa-dbs.

-Rob