solving solving storage for your smb storage for your smb

1 Solving Storage for Your SMB, an Internet.com Storage eBook. © 2009, WebMediaBrands Inc.

Solving Storage for Your SMB

an Storage eBook®

Solving Storagefor your SMB


2 Cost-Cutting Storage Strategies for Small Businesses

4 10 Easy Ways to Save on Storage

6 SMB Disaster Recovery Insurance Plan

8 Understanding Online Backup Options

11 SMB Disaster Recovery Options Go Beyond Online Backup

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8 10

Contents…

This content was adapted from Internet.com’s Enterprise IT Planet and Small Business Computing Web sites. Contributors: Drew Robb and Brian Horowitz




The economy’s in the toilet, and that means tighter belts for the foreseeable future. About the only thing that’s accumulating faster than the national debt is the amount of data small businesses need to store

and protect.

“The downturn in the U.S. economy is having a significant impact on small and medium business priorities and plans for technology acquisition,” said Justin Jaffe, an analyst at Interna-tional Data Corp. (IDC). “Thirty-eight percent of small firms are more likely to delay IT spending, and 42 percent of medium-sized businesses are more likely to re-duce IT spending.

However, according to various IDC surveys of IT users, storage is one of a few categories where buyers are reluctant to cut spending.

Storage for Less Even though storage budgets aren’t on the chopping block just yet, it is still important to find ways to cut costs. One of the big ways is storage-as-a-service (SaaS), which is really starting to gain ground. In very broad terms, SaaS encompasses online storage services, cloud computing, and various other labels.

While there are differences between these concepts, the general idea is that firms can experience the benefits of backup, disaster recovery, and long-term record retention

technologies without having to concern themselves with pur-chasing, installing, and maintaining the hardware or software involved. They just access what they need over the Web.

SaaS is expanding rapidly as small businesses need to store the ever-growing volumes of data and digital files. Accord-ing to IDC, storage-as-a-service capacity will grow from 174 petabytes in 2007 to more than 2.1 exabytes in 2012. The

bulk of this is being consumed by online backup and archiving services.

“Use of SaaS has been evolving during the past decade, and the SaaS model has become increas-ingly popular over the past three or four years,” said Sharon Mertz, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

One such service is Mozy by Decho, a part of EMC. EMC ac-quired this company as part of its SMB and consumer strategy. You can obtain up to 2 GB of online backup free at Mozy. Beyond that, you pay a few dollars a month per person.

“Mozy has a customers ranging from General Electric to the home office, but the fastest growing segment is small busi-ness,” said Vance Checketts, chief operating officer of Mozy.

Other online backup providers include Backup.com by Syman-tec Corp, iBackup.com from Pro Softnet Corp., and i365.com

Cost-Cutting Storage Strategies for Small Businesses

By Drew Robb

Thirty-eight percent of small firms are more likely to delay IT spending, and 42 percent of medium-sized businesses are more likely to reduce IT spending ”“



by Seagate. The big boys of storage have gobbled up many of the small SaaS outfits – a sure sign of a hot commodity.

Virtualization Eases the Storage Burden Another area where small businesses potentially can reap high return on investment (ROI) is storage virtualization.

“IT administrators will be challenged to add capacity with static or shrinking budgets, yet add capacity they must,” said John Webster, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. “Storage virtual-ization can drive more users on existing hardware platforms.”

The essential idea behind storage virtualization is to unite multiple stor-age devices into what appears to be a single storage pool, which you can centrally manage. Thus it becomes easier to manage these devices and back them up.

Vendors offering storage virtualiza-tion solutions to small businesses include LeftHand Networks (recently acquired by HP) and EqualLogic (acquired by Dell). Both offer storage area networks (SANs) that operate over existing Ethernet connections as opposed to requiring expensive Fibre Channel (FC) networks.

HP has smartly integrated its LeftHand products with its ProLiant servers. Thus any small business already utilizing HP ProLiant servers in a virtual server environment can now add a virtual SAN into the mix.

“LeftHand Networks SAN software currently runs on HP ProLiant Servers within virtual machines,” said Lee Johns, director of entry-level storage at HP. “The virtualization ca-pabilities of the LeftHand products coupled with HP Pro-Liant servers provide customers with an easier-to-manage, integrated virtual server and storage solution.”

Solid State Disks This last item is perhaps not one that small businesses will be rushing to buy early in the year. Nor is it something that will be cheap – at least for now. But it’s an item that many small businesses will be rushing to buy before the year is out -- Solid State Drives (SSD).

SSDs – also known as flash drives – remove the delays caused by standard hard disks. Today’s superfast proces-sors and memory are severely hampered by the relatively

sluggish rate at which disk access occurs. As SSDs have no moving parts, they are far more reliable; they also consume far less power.

“SSDs hold the promise of eliminating the performance gap that has existed and grown ever since the industry first started using hard drives for storage,” said Phil Mills, chair of the Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA).

He added, “This performance gap exists today because servers have gotten faster and faster while storage systems,

which use a spinning disk and me-chanical movement of the read/write heads, have not kept up.”

As a result, servers and disk arrays have to spend a significant portion of their time waiting on reading and writing operations to complete, thus negatively impacting system perfor-mance.

IDC reports that the SSD market was worth $400 million in 2007. With anticipated growth of more than 70 percent per year, the analyst firm pre-dicts a $5.7 billion market by 2012.

For the moment, price is a downside. Intel, for example, sells SSDs at a bulk discount (for orders of a 1,000 or more) for $595 each. For an 80 GB model, that’s an awful lot more than ordinary hard drives. That price, however, came down 45 percent in six months.

“Very soon, we all will be using flash drives,” said Dave Nicolson, a technology consultant at EMC. “There are a lot more flash manufacturers now so the price decrease in the next 12 months will be even greater.”

SSDs are currently available from a range of vendors includ-ing Seagate, HP, Intel, Western Digital, Sun, STEC and oth-ers. Expect more and more companies to jump on the flash drive bandwagon – and thereby drive down prices – over the course of 2009.

“There have been a few times in the history of computing when a new technology becomes completely pivotal to changing the PC platform and the user experience,” said Gordon Moore, founder of Intel. “Solid state drives have this capability. This is unmatched by any other technology I can identify.” n

Today’s superfast processors and

memory are severely hampered by the relatively sluggish rate at which disk access occurs.

”

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In today’s economy, storage managers are being asked to contribute more to the profitability of the business. Here are 10 ways to make tangible headway.

1. Get VisibleUse Storage Resource Management (SRM) to provide visi-bility into storage operations. Users can then see the storage they have, where it is and current status, as well as determin-ing storage inefficiencies and seeing how assets are being allocated or consumed.

“SRM can simplify management of complex enterprise storage environments, optimizing the use of storage resources for data protec-tion and application availability,” said Stefan Kochishan, director, mainframe product marketing at CA. “It enables storage managers to take immediate corrective action when storage space is running low, is allocated ineffectively or when information needs to be backed up.”

He gives the example of using SRM to monitor, report, and initiate the reclaiming of space for files no longer used or unnecessary. By doing so, large amounts of capacity can be recovered, thereby delaying the purchase of more hardware.

2. Scrutinize Evolving Storage ObjectivesTo take control of an organization’s storage infrastructure,

users must define and regularly review clear storage man-agement objectives to ensure they are delivering premium service to your business. Depending on organizational needs, storage objectives should include such things as centralized management of multi-platform and multi-vendor storage environments, knowledge of where the data resides and how it is being used, policy-based threshold storage management of current business practices, and a plan for reclaiming space currently wasted on data not supporting

business functions.

“It is also important to trend and forecast storage usage based on historical data,” said Kochishan. “In addition, it is vital to improve utilization of current storage as-sets to eliminate costly purchases and reduce TCO. This should be scrutinized when reviewing storage objectives.”

3. AutomateAutomation ensures accuracy, saves time, and improves produc-tivity and effectiveness. Yet dozens of processes are still being done

manually. Kochishan says that while a few years ago, auto-mation was in its infancy, many everyday functions have now been automated. By adopting such software, ROI can be slashed and costs reduced by extending the use and longev-ity of existing storage investments.

Take the example of monitoring for exception conditions that will require intervention. Today, this can be accomplished

10 Easy Ways to Save on Storage

By Drew Robb

Automation ensures accuracy, saves time, and improves productivity and effectiveness.

Yet dozens of processes are still being done manually ”“



easily, including the establishment of utilization thresholds that, if surpassed, initiate notification for corrective action such as backup, archive or deletion of the offending files.

4. Low-Hanging FruitSometimes it’s the simple things that can make daily work experience easier. Storage managers should effectively clas-sify storage use but focus on the easy things that provide the biggest payback either in reclaimed storage or data protec-tion for business continuity.

For example: Remove any personal, unnecessary or large file types from expensive corporate storage resources and ensure compliance with corporate directives where certain file types are not permitted. In particular, look for files whose name ends with .mpeg, .mpg, .mp3, .wav, .pst, .log, .bak, and so on. These files can then be deleted to increase usable storage space.

Another example is to monitor volumes to identify unused files, such as those not accessed in more than one month. These files can then be archived or deleted to make storage available to the system.

5. Technology Refresh or Improve Practices?When storage infrastructures are close to reaching capac-ity, the usual response is tactical: Add more hardware. This may inadvertently compound ongoing issues and add to the administrative burden.

“Rather than acquiring new hardware in a down economy, it could make more sense reviewing your storage objectives and practices for ways to improve,” said Kochishan. “For instance, make use of trending and forecasting utilities to provide what-if scenarios aligned to an organization’s busi-ness growth. Users will be able to heighten the accuracy of storage acquisitions and potentially defer expensive pur-chases.”

6. Green StorageStorage managers can play a significant role in making IT greener. In some cases, it may make sense to buy new, more energy-efficient green storage devices. But in other cases, the upfront costs preclude such investment, and it is nec-essary to harness existing tools and resources to reduce energy consumption or cooling requirements.

“For example, in large z/OS installations, an improvement in utilization of just a few percentage points can help recoup several terabytes in wasted disk space,” said Kochishan. “Alternatively, move less frequently used files to tape media

that doesn’t require energy on an ongoing basis.”

7. Tape ManagementTape technology continues to thrive in the data center. Opti-mization and automation of tape assets can yield significant cost savings, save time and resources, and reduce overall tape TCO. Underutilization of tape, in particular, is a major area of wastage, said Kochishan. Virtual tape technology is one way to reduce the number of physical tape drives and cartridges. It can reduce physical tape media requirements as utilization of physical tape capacity nears 100 percent.

8. Enterprise Scale Enterprise-wide adoption of automation, monitoring, re-porting and forecasting capabilities widens the scope of storage savings. Instead of bit and piece implementations, an enterprise-wide adoption of tools such as SRM, timed to coincide with a major storage technology refresh, can maximize existing resources by eliminating vast quantities of manual labor. This helps improve business service levels by proactively identifying and eliminating problems before they impact the overall system.

9. EncryptionThe business value provided by encryption can be measured in terms of protection from the negative publicity, loss of cus-tomers, fines and other consequences of a data breach. Ac-cording to a study by the Ponemon Institute, the remediation of compromised data cost businesses an average of $197 per compromised customer record — with an average total per-incident cost of $6.3 million. Costs include legal fees, in-vestigative and administrative expenses, stock performance, customer defections, opportunity loss, public relations, and customer support costs.

“Implementing a data encryption policy protects the busi-ness against the potential serious consequences of a data breach,” said Kochishan.

10. Keys to the Kingdom Arguably, more important than data encryption is the se-cured management of encryption keys. The business value of encryption key management can be measured in terms of protection from application outages that result from the inability to access encrypted data due to lost or corrupted encryption keys. While businesses can likely tolerate four to five hours of downtime before experiencing significant revenue loss, each hour of downtime can cost $25,000 or more when all costs associated with lost sales, wages and production are considered. n



It isn’t easy adopting a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) strategy if you are in the SMB category. As Mem-phis-based Lipscomb & Pitts Insurance LLC has a little over 100 employees, it can only afford to have one or two

people in IT.

“Although we had had two IT staff, one was more of a lower level desktop support person so in reality we only had one technically skilled network-based person,” said Mike Yates, vice president of finance at Lipscomb and Pitts. “If he was out of the office, sick, had a sick child, or was overwhelmed by service calls, everything else shut down.”

One guy backing up data for 100 staff and looking after a whole lot more besides was a recipe for failure. Now factor in the demands of management to improve backup processes and add in greater DR protec-tion and it became obvious that something had to change.

“We were not comfortable having one person responsible for all of our IT tasks, including data protection, because it was a potential liability in the event of a disaster,” said Yates.

The company decided to outsource its network infrastruc-ture, data backup, and support as well as the CIO role and ordering of new equipment. For that, it turned to masterIT LLC, a Bartlett, Tenn.-based managed services provider. It

now has only one IT person who handles desktop support and special project work. masterIT utilizes EVault InfoStage and EVault InfoStage DualVault by Seagate Technology, plus Agent plug-ins for Microsoft SQL Server, Novell Netware and Open Transaction Manager.

All of this is operated by masterIT as part of its “IT as a Util-ity” managed service. A total of seven Windows servers take care of 250 GB of backup each night.

“I feel a much greater level of comfort knowing that our data is backed up, 300 miles away on a daily basis,” said Yates. “I also feel much better knowing that I have more than one per-spective on a problem. Previ-ously, I would have one person to ask a question or bounce an idea off of. Now, I have one person internally, and access to four or five people externally all with various backgrounds, perspectives and expertise.”

Steady GrowthLipscomb & Pitts Insurance has grown from a two-man of-fice in 1954 to more than 100 employees today. It is the larg-est privately held insurance agency in the Mid-South. More than 150 carriers rely on it for personal and commercial insurance, as well as health, life, and employee benefits.

To cope with steady growth and further safeguard its data,

SMB Disaster Recovery Insurance Plan

By Drew Robb

One guy backing up data for 100 staff and looking after a whole lot more besides

was a recipe for failure. ”“



Yates investigated the possibility of moving to a faster back-up platform and establishing a collocated data center off site. The price tag soon persuaded him against that course of action and continued making manual backups and storing tapes offsite at a local bank in case of disaster.

masterIT conducted an assessment of the site and general IT needs. This convinced Yates that disk-based backup could be a viable option. The company hired masterIT to take over much of the backup and network management. Evault provides both local and remote online backup and recovery without involvement from IT at Lipscomb & Pitts.

“It’s a great comfort knowing the data is going out every night to a site 300 miles away rather than going down the street to the bank,” said Yates. “The process with EVault and mas-terIT has been largely transparent to our staff. The backups literally run themselves.”

With the company operating in the insurance field, it is used to providing reassurance to clients about intangible benefits

such as peace of mind if any negative events take place. In this case, however, Lipscomb & Pitts actually gets to prac-tice the event. masterIT performs a full test-restore of the

data every month to verify everything is as it should be.

“After we started performing test restores with masterIT, I felt a great sense of relief,” said Yates. “When I got the call that the data was now in Atlanta and being tested regularly for restores, it was quite a load off my mind.”

He advises IT managers not to tempt fate by leaving their data unprotected. With such services available, he said it is possible for companies to achieve full protection without having to spend an arm and a leg. But as it will cost something, you have to break down the economics so management can clearly see the value.

“Show the CEO what eight hours of down time costs in paid wages, lost revenue, and immeasur-able cost in lost confidence by your clients or key vendors,” said Yates. “That’s the best way to put a number on it.” n

Show the CEO what eight hours

of down time costs in paid wages,

lost revenue, and immeasurable cost in lost confidence by your clients or

key vendors

”

“

EMC2, EMC, and the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. © Copyright 2011 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.

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When you own a small business and you can’t afford to lose those accounting statements, graphic design illustrations or medical re-cords, keeping all your files in one location

isn’t the best option. Storage industry insiders say back-ing up your information on external hard drives and CDs is important, but if your office or home is hit by a disaster, your data can be lost.

With extra backup becoming critical for businesses, it’s no won-der that online backup services have emerged as a major industry. Today, a slew of vendors compete for the atten-tion of small to mid-sized businesses looking to the Internet to safeguard their data.

But with everyone getting into the action — from Internet startups to major banks like Wells Fargo, which announced its VSafe storage service last year — how should a small business select its backup service?

One place to start is by considering vendors that store back-ups in an offsite location and to make sure that even those backups are secured in a second spot.

Vance Checketts, COO of Mozy, cited the horror of backup

tapes from the University of Utah Medical Center being stolen from an offsite facility. If the facility had used an online backup service, he explained, the health records for 2.2 mil-lion patients would not have been lost. (They were recovered later, however.)

Choosing a service that backs up the data to a separate location “will cost the service provider more and cost you more, but you have to decide for yourself how much risk exposure you want to take,” said Adam Couture, an analyst at research firm Gartner.

Set and Forget According to David Friend, CEO of online backup provider Carbo-nite, the service must be “dead simple” and auto-matic. “When you’re out in the field and sitting in

a Starbucks, your backup should be working,” he said.

“You want to find someone that is a big, well-financed busi-ness, because when you need your backup, you want your vendor to be there,” said Friend.

Daniel Stevenson, director of channel marketing at Iron Mountain Digital, also stressed his company’s pedigree. He

Understanding Online Backup Options

By Brian Horowitz

With extra backup becoming critical for businesses, it’s no wonder that online backup services have emerged

as a major industry ”“



suggested that buyers ask, “Is this a fly-by-night operation or a vendor that truly understands what it means to protect customer information?”

It’s important to check the reputation of the provider you choose, especially for small businesses such as doctors’ of-fices, writers and consultants. In those sorts of businesses, consumers rely on the information produced by the busi-ness.

“We are producers of what other people consume,” said Joseph Martins, managing director of the research firm Data Mobility Group.

Insiders suggested trying out the services before committing to a plan. “Make sure you do some test restores and can get the data back if you need to,” suggested Sam Gutmann, CEO of backup service Intronis Technolo-gies.

Also important is making certain that a solution can address all of your business’s systems. Mozy’s Check-etts, for instance, said his service of-fers an online dashboard that allows users to control the backup settings for all computers in their company.

Likewise, Gartner’s Couture pointed out that an ideal service should support multiple operating systems. Some do not support Mac, for instance.

Security and Capacity Experts such as Checketts and Gutmann of Intronis, also stressed the importance of encrypting data before it leaves your machine — and ensuring it stays safe throughout its trip to the datacenter. In particular, they recommended using a method such as Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES.

According to Stevenson, “Security tends to come up very early in the conversation.” Vendors ask Iron Mountain, “Where’s my data being taken? Is it encrypted when it leaves your office or when it gets to the storage location? Who’s storing the information?”

Checketts advises choosing a service that allows for at least 10GB of storage, while Carbonite’s Friend stressed the need for unlimited storage due to the possibility of users hav-ing to contend with a convoluted purchasing process at the

moment they need to add capacity.

“Users will get a confusing message — they won’t know what to do with it,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to think about that stuff.”

According to Data Mobility Group’s Martins, you want to make sure the service is geared toward small businesses rather than home users. Some services will only back up based on this category.

Relying on Retention Several insiders, including Lauren Whitehouse, an analyst at the En-terprise Strategy Group, and Iron Mountain’s Stevenson, said an ideal service should be able to retain data for any period of time.

“Does it only store my data for 30 days, or can I select a certain amount of data for one year?” Stevenson suggested users ask. For example, according to Gutmann, his company lets users specify precisely how long they want to keep their data, for peri-ods such as four days, 12 months, or seven years.

You should also be able to save cop-ies at various stages, Whitehouse said. This way, it’s quicker to back up the files with just the latest changes

and you can restore from any point.

“That’s a very key component to an online backup solution,” agreed Robert Haines, business development manager at Pro Softnet, parent company of the iDrive service.

Laura Dubois, an analyst covering storage for research firm IDC, said the online backup service you choose should let you recover data either through download or a quick ship-ment of discs. Brick-and-mortar office supplies retailer Staples offers one option that provides physical and online backup.

And when you need to need to recover the data from physi-cal sources, how long does it take? Shail Khiyara, senior vice president of Seagate Technology’s i365 EVault unit, said some online backup services have a three- to five-day waiting period to receive CDs in the mail.

It’s important to check the reputation of the provider you choose, especially

for small businesses such as doctors’

offices, writers and consultants

”

“



Getting Your Money’s Worth With all of the options out there in the market, it still may not always be clear how to ensure you’re getting the biggest bang for the buck. Fortunately, there are a number of ways a small business can ensure it’s not overpaying for its storage service.

For starters, the services should allow users to choose which types of files they want to back up, Couture said, enabling the services to pick up only business-critical docu-ments like Microsoft Excel XLS files, PowerPoint PPT docu-ments, and others.

“If I’m a businessman paying for the backup, I don’t want to pay for MP3 recordings, just XLS, PPT, Word files — things that are truly related to the business,” he explained.

It’s also important to consider whether a solution offers simple setup and doesn’t require any additional, hidden expenses. Stevenson suggested asking, “Do they need to go out and purchase multiple components to make it work, or is it an out-of-the-box solution?”

Martins advises users to find out what the total cost per month will be for a service they’re considering, including any hidden fees.

According to Gutmann, one fee worth paying for is compres-sion. That way, you can fit more data into the space you’re purchasing. While some vendors charge $1 a gig for un-compressed space, Intronis will charge $2 for compressed space, however.

“Make sure you really know whether it’s compressed,” he ex-plained. “Otherwise, you can’t make a correct comparison.”

Greg Schulz, senior analyst and founder of StorageIO Group, warned that some companies may charge a fee for extra bandwidth consumed, to send or recover data, and for extra copies made.

Couture said to watch out for files being copied more than once, since this can run up the bill. Vendors like Carbonite charge a flat fee for unlimited storage, such as $49.95 a year, while others like Mozy charge per gigabyte for its busi-ness product.

Therefore it’s important to make sure the vendor offers de-duplication and backs up files only once. “If you’re not doing de-duplication, the amount of storage you can consume is going to be a lot larger than if you’re not doing de-duplica-tion,” Couture said. n



Beyond online backup there are cost-effective op-tions available for organizations that want to either perform the backups themselves or just go a bit further. While setting up a complete replication site

might be out of the question for most organizations, what are some other options?

“Small businesses with a more organized approach to IT can perform daily backups and ro-tate them off-site for one to four weeks,” said Chip Nickolett, the owner of systems integra-tor Comprehensive Consulting Solutions in Brookfield, Wisc. “There are also sometimes end-of-month, -quarter, -year, or other period archives that are retained permanently, but I see that at no more than 50 percent of the companies I visit.”

He warned, however, against a commonplace SMB approach: nickel and diming on tape cartridge costs by over-reliance on incremental backups. Some companies use increments cor-rectly — backing up new data or changed files daily and conducting a full backup at least once a week. Others, however, try to get by with one initial full backup and do only incrementals thereafter, either on a daily or weekly basis. Many online services, for example, take this exact approach. Nickolett sees several potential prob-lems with this method.

“Incremental backups are often used to save tapes and/or time, but the possibility for data or tape errors, or lost tapes is very high,” said Nickolett. “Full backups are what I recom-mend.”

Some SMBs argue against this by saying they have too many systems, and this requires too much infrastructure. One solu-tion to this issue is to stagger backup schedules so differ-

ent systems are backed up at different times or on different nights.

And when it comes to DR, of course, it is vital to fully docu-ment such procedures, as well as the environment, interfaces, interactions and dependencies. That way, someone perform-ing a recovery will understand if additional work must be performed to make the environ-ment consistent.

“Some systems are completely ignored because they are not viewed as being material or important, such as DNS and Active Directory servers, as

well as gateway systems,” said Nickolett. “This often causes last minute problems during recovery that require time con-suming troubleshooting and ad-hoc recovery to fix.”

Attila Kozma, president of Earth to Stars of Glendale, Calif., which sells ThetaBackup.com, said adding more backup and

Incremental backups are often used to save tapes and/or time, but the possibility for data or

tape errors, or lost tapes is very high ”“

SMB Disaster Recovery Options Go Beyond Online Backup

By Drew Robb



DR sophistication cannot be done well without hiring more staff. Without someone in charge, employees tend to move files between folders, not follow filing practice and in general create havoc with the data. As a result, unnecessary data will be backed up, and mission-critical data may be missed. With someone hired for IT, filing policies can be more easily enforced and misfiling can be corrected so proper folders/drives are backed up.

“Anywhere beyond 50 computers in the company, and you have to consider a full-time IT person,” said Kozma. “He should be able to come up with the most optimal solution for the company.”

One obvious place to start is to assign a dedicated computer for backup purposes. Rudimen-tary off-site protection can be achieved by placing this machine in a different location, even if it’s in the owner’s or the IT guy’s house. For those with tight budgets, a commodity XP-based desktop can be used, although Kozma recommends having one with a RAID5 controller and configuring RAID5 to have a hot spare hard disk drive (HDD). That way, if one drive in the array fails, the hot spare takes its place.

This arrangement can be further enhanced in two ways. First, centralize all SMB files on one file server or network-attached storage (NAS) box to facilitate easy backups. Rather than backing up 50 or more machines, or a dozen servers, data can be backed up easily from one system. Of course, that means making sure employees (and the owner) save everything on the central system rather than on their desktops or laptops.

“One of the biggest sources of lost data is information kept on individual computers in the company and not in a central repository,” says Kozma.

The second element is the creation of a virtual private net-work (VPN) between the central file server and the off-site backup computer. Fortunately, this is much easier than it used to be, as most new Internet routers have the capability to create a VPN. Software-based VPNs are also available, such as www.hamachi.cc from LogMeIn of Woburn, Mass. By connecting both sites via the VPN, mapping the different drives and configuring the backup software, a more robust

backup setup can be established.

Replication Nation What about replication? For many SMBs, replicating the IT environment to an off-site location is out of the question. As well as being expensive, such a set up is typically beyond the capability of a lone IT guy. It can also be difficult to man-age.

“You want to get the backups at least 200 miles away from your primary location, and for businesses in Gulf Coast states, a copy should be out of state,” said Rob Cosgrove, CEO of Remote Backup Systems of Memphis, Tenn. “Most

SMBs of less than 200 staff members don’t have the techni-cal resources or staff to develop, install and manage their own replication site.”

He said this is the reason many SMBs are replacing traditional tapes and on-site disk storage with online backup solutions. This enables them to take advantage of the enterprise-quality infra-structure of their providers as well as their off-site and replication services.

But online backup might not cut it in the eyes of auditors, government regulations or industry best practices. Nickolett, therefore, suggested an inexpensive way to implement repli-cation that has worked at a few of his clients’ sites.

“Something that we’ve done with several customers is to replicate the database transaction log or journal files that contain the changes [made] to the database since the last backup,” said Nickolett. “These are small files that can be quickly and easily copied to a remote system and used for recovery if necessary.”

Such a strategy assumes operational data is more dynamic than the environment supporting it, so an infrastructure recovery from the previous day would suffice in most cases. This approach requires custom program or script develop-ment to automate, but it is generally cost-effective, performs well, and can often be developed and implemented using in-house resources.

Alternatively, there are products that replicate database changes similar to the method described above but use commercial software instead of custom applications. Gold-

Anywhere beyond 50 computers in the

company, and you have to consider a full-time

IT person

”

“



enGate Software in San Francisco is one vendor that offers such products.

Outsource It SMBs, by necessity, must outsource many services to survive. For those that want to take a step beyond online backup, co-location might be a possibility. Large co-location facilities (whether from national providers, such as AT&T and Cogent Communications, or regional providers, such as Qwest and Norlight Communications) can provide hosting services at various locations for a monthly fee that is typically around $2,000 per rack or less, said Nickolett.

“This might be an option for SMBs with mission-critical applications and data that need a safer or more robust alternate site,” he said. “When doing this, it is also helpful to think about workspace recovery — something critical for a full business continuity plan. Companies like Norlight Communi-cations (in the Milwaukee area) can provide these services for a reasonable annual fee.” n

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