Cloud ‘Recovery’ or Just The Same Old Thing?
Posted by amcanty on March 1, 2010
Conversely, poor performance in these tasks can cost value and competitive advantage. There is no benefit in doing these tasks well, but there is cost to doing them badly. This is like the opposite of a financial call option – lots of downside risk, but no upside.
For companies planning their first disaster recovery data center, with the associated selection, build, and maintenance tasks for servers, storage, and networking, cloud computing seems like an obvious fit. They can trade the capital expense that buys them no new value, for a no-commitment operating expense that probably buys better operating practices than they could achieve themselves.
Solutions are beginning to grow up around this idea of cloud recovery. The name is a little optimistic because most offerings today are traditional backup solutions, with little or no ability to actually recover in the cloud. Although a lot of vendors in the backup industry are making cloud announcements, they are mostly just letting users store backups in the cloud. In order to really deserve the cloud recovery title a solution should have the following features.
- The ability to recover workloads in the cloud: The cloud can offer more than just a place to dump your backup files. It can provide the computing systems to run your recovered systems, and after a production system fails, the ability to quickly restart a complete replacement with data, applications, and complete configuration in the cloud.
- Effectively unlimited scalability with little or no up-front provisioning: A few vendors can offer rapid, off-site recovery, but they don’t really qualify for the cloud title unless they provide lots of stand-by capacity with no up-front reservations or configuration. While this seems like a lot to ask, this is the promise of cloud computing.
- Pay-per-use billing model: A defining characteristic of cloud computing is that we only pay for the things we use. Use a little this week and pay a little; if we use a lot next week then we pay more, but only for that specific week.
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