In recent blog entries I've discussed the advantages of AmeriVault's new ReStartIT-VDR service and how easily it allows companies to execute on their plans to put a DR plan in place. So the question is why aren't companies moving faster? Most likely because companies have failed to take a hard look at their current tape based backup environment and come to grips that they have no assurance whatsoever that they can recover their business applications using tape.

I am not anti-tape but business recovery requirements have fundamentally changed. Despite this fact, companies persist in using tape when the recovery requirements of today's business applications are not hours, days or weeks but seconds, minutes or at most hours. These requirements completely obliterate whatever rationale companies might have for wanting to stick with tape as their primary means of recovery but still they do so.

This does not even take into account all of the headaches associated with managing the tape media itself. Tape media breaks and wears down, the tape cartridge and tape drive format may be incompatible, tape rotation is difficult to manage and tapes can be lost or difficult to find. Then add in intangibles like documentation, expertise and like systems at a secondary site in order to recover the data. The irony is that the entire premise of using tape as a foundation for disaster recovery is based on a lie and the sooner companies realize this the sooner they can get off the tape merry-go-round and start to focus on making smart decisions about how to backup and recover their corporate data.

The beautiful thing about what AmeriVault is doing is they are making the smart decision easier for businesses to make. In essence, AmeriVault backs up and recovers your data for the same amount of money or less than you are spending now while guaranteeing it will work. From my viewpoint, you have to be crazy, stupid or looking to join the ranks of the unemployed not to listen to this message. So my recommendation is for more companies to take the blinders off and take a harder look at what AmeriVault's online backup and its accompanying ReStartIT-VDR can offer in solving one's backup and DR problems in 2008.

Today, December 21st, marks the official launch of AmeriVault's new ReStartIT-VDR and ReStartIT-HA services. Though December 21st is primarily marked in the annals of history as the day when the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, MA, for AmeriVault in particular and small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in general, it may well serve as a point of demarcation in terms of changing how businesses can expect to restart their IT operations using AmeriVault's services should a disaster occur.

The spectrum of disasters that may impact a company's IT operations is vast. Though the number of natural disasters is fairly finite - blizzards, earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes and tornados, to name a few - there is an almost an infinite number of minor disasters that are just as disruptive to IT operations, such as broken water pipes, defective air conditioners, overloaded electrical circuits or an out of control car crashing into the side of your computer room. Any of these disasters can force a company with minimal or no warning to abruptly move and restart their IT operations at another location just to stay in business.

However anyone involved in corporate operations understands that the trials and tribulations involved with configuring, setting up and then managing an alternative site is no trivial task. Aside from the costs associated with setting up a disaster recovery (DR) site, other intangible factors that come into play include:

· Who takes the lead in a DR scenario?

· Who takes the lead if that person is not available?

· Who is responsible for funding for the DR site?

· What if there is inadequate funding to recover certain applications at the DR site?

· Who tests the recovery of applications and how often?

· How quickly do you need to recover your business?

· Can your DR site support multiple recovery points? If not, do you need and can you afford to change your DR configuration?

· What if it is a partial disaster and you only need to recover some of your applications at your DR site? Do you fail everything over or just the affected applications?

This is why the new ReStartIT-VDR and -HA services from AmeriVault make so much sense for so many businesses. For about $25,000 a year, a business with 300 GB of production data can introduce a level of business continuity and application recovery that previously was available only to companies with DR budgets of millions of dollars and dedicated staff.

Over the last few years, many of the major vendors in traditional backup software and storage solutions have strayed from their well-established roots. Iron Mountain, Seagate, EMC and Symantec have all jumped into the online backup managed service pool mostly via acquisition. IBM even made a splash last week as the latest vendor to announce an acquisition of an online backup managed service provider (MSP).

But what does this mean for end users facing solution decisions going forward? In the past it was just a question of what tape media, tape drive and offsite records management provider to use. Now the choices are tape, disk or managed services. To address these issues, I caught up with AmeriVault's Director of Marketing, Scott Bush, to discuss this industry trend and what challenges that end users face.

First, Scott raised some questions where potential conflicts of interest may arise when a publicly-traded enterprise with a traditional in-house solution acquires an online backup service provider.

Second, in this consolidation climate, Scott feels AmeriVault's position is ideal. It maintains a highly-secure and redundant infrastructure and then adopts best-of-breed software to deliver the latest advances available such as continuous backup and deduplication. Being very deep and narrow in online data protection assures AmeriVault stays focused on customer needs and the number of touches needed to optimize service and facilitate disaster recoveries.

To further differentiate but remain true to data protection, AmeriVault continues to wrap complementary services around its online backup service including RestartIT-VDR, an economical, remote recovery solution and AmeriVault-DV, a lifecycle and archiving service that handles older, less-accessed data. These offerings coupled with its highly available  infrastructure and its continued independence should give AmeriVault advantages that allow them to compete with other companies who are buying their way into the business.

That's the state of online backup according to AmeriVault's CIO, Kevin Harris. In the 10 years since he and CEO Bud Stoddard founded AmeriVault, he has seen tremendous changes in customer perceptions and understanding about online backup.

Back then the Internet was still in its infancy and the idea of using online backup to send data over the Internet was a "scary thing" in the eyes of prospective AmeriVault clients. Harris says, "We had to prove everything including how we would backup data, how they would recover data and if it was secure and safe."

In 2007 these issues are largely laid to rest as most prospective customers now understand how it works. The larger problem Harris deals with now is how does AmeriVault differentiate itself? Customers can now go out to Google, do a search on online backup and get 30 pages of hits on companies that provide online backup. Since they all look the same based on Google search results, now the first question prospective clients are most likely to ask is, "What vendor should I choose?"

Choosing a vendor based on the lowest price is simply not enough anymore since, as Harris puts it, "online backup prices are all over the map". There are multiple criteria to consider when selecting a managed service provider and many now use the same underlying backup software to provide online backup services. In this competitive environment, Harris says one of AmeriVault's differentiators is to offer a "high touch" approach.

Harris points to AmeriVault's call center as one of the ways they deliver on that promise. Though businesses can contact AmeriVault by email, when they need to recover data they almost always use the phone. To make good on that promise, AmeriVault has its own people answering calls but during periods of high call volumes, AmeriVault contracts with a third party answering service to answer the overflow who immediately contact AmeriVault. 'No one is ever stuck leaving a voice message," promises Harris.

Providing service level agreements is the other primary way that Harris sees as an AmeriVault differentiator. AmeriVault guarantees three 9's of uptime (99.9% system availability) and response times of two hours or less on all customer calls on or off business hours. "As far as I know, we are the only managed service provider in the industry that provides these types of guarantees," says Harris.

As AmeriVault's CIO Harris astutely points out, "high touch" will become, if it is not already, a key to customers to selecting the right provider of online backup services for them. Google makes it easy to find scores of providers whose offerings on the surface may look very similar and provide no easy way to differentiate between providers. By wrapping "high touch" around online backup services and then stamping it with a guarantee, AmeriVault makes the choice of an online backup provider an easier one to make.

That's the question Jeannine Gaudreau, the Manager of Network Engineering and Security at Darwin Partners, a Wakefield, MA, based IT Services firm asked over eight years ago. When she first assumed her role at Darwin Partners, she initially could backup all of Darwin Partner's data to a single tape. At that time her biggest concerns were simply remembering to take the backup tape offsite and buy new tapes when they expired. However as Darwin Partners grew, so did the amount of data she needed to manage and backup.

As she watched her company's data growth rate explode, she saw that it was outstripping her ability to manage the backups and recover the data. This situation drove her to examine not only how to better backup and recover her company's data but do so in a more cost-effective means while creating an offsite option for disaster recovery. This situation was amplified as Darwin Partners grew and added offices in San Francisco and China as these offices needed to remain operational should a disaster strike Darwin Partner's Wakefield, MA, data center.

She initially examined more traditional options of setting up a secondary data center or doing a collocation with another company but both of them came with a huge price tag. This prompted her to take a look at AmeriVault's online backup service in 1999. While maintaining full control over her backup requirements, she wouldn't have to worry about scaling issues and could quickly add servers or remote sites on demand. Data sets, retentions and frequency were all easily customizable while AmeriVault would seamlessly manage the back end storage.

Jeannine's decision to switch to online backup in 1999 definitely represented a "thinking outside of the box" mentality at that time since only now, in 2007, is online backup maturing among SMBs. But as Jeannine can attest, she now spends far less time thinking about whether or not last night's backups happened plus she now has a number of viable and affordable options to recover her company's data should a disaster strike.

As Darwin Partners discovered, companies can not afford not to examine AmeriVault's online backup service as a viable offering. In addition to the benefits of eliminating tape management and monitoring daily backups, AmeriVault gives them more options to recover their data and, with new service offerings like RestartIT-VDR and AmeriVault-DV, new possibilities for disaster recovery and data archiving that they normally could not deliver in-house.

The October 2007 issue of InfoStor magazine ran an article entitled "IT's New Dirty Little Secret" which includes an estimate from the Enterprise Strategy Group where they believe that 60 - 80% of data on primary storage today is static or persistent data. Static or persistent data is not accessed at all for 90 days or more after its initial creation which then consumes valuable storage capacity and data center power. This is "IT's new dirty little secret," says analyst Heidi Biggar.

While I do agree that IT may hide this information from business managers (or minimally does not draw their attention to it), this cover-up is probably not as sinister as it sounds. The deeper problem is that IT has no practical, economical and easy-to-implement-and-manage solutions for this problem. Archiving, virtualization and HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) software are just some of the possible ways to tackle and address this issue that has been around for years. But even the InfoStor article brings out that only a limited number of companies have implemented this software and most have taken no action at all on the problem.

So why aren't more companies taking action? The answer is two-fold. First, taking action is not simple. All of the aforementioned tools usually require corporate buy-in, lengthy purchasing cycles and time to implement the software. Meanwhile the cost of disk continues to drop so they know, to a certain degree, buying more disk is always an option. Second, who will manage the software and new hardware once they acquire it? Buying cheaper disk storage systems or storing more data to tape saves money now but instead of managing just one or two expensive storage devices, they now have more hardware to manage. This introduces other risks and complexity into an organization and partially defeats the purpose for better managing the data in the first place.

AmeriVault, known for remote online data backup services, also delivers online file archiving for lifecycle management of this static data. This is a natural fit for a common problem that many businesses face - backup windows. AmeriVault uses backup software that takes block-level changes and compresses data sets with traditional algorithms and deduplication. Combine that with their new archiving software that archives static, less critical data and all-night backup may now take less than a few hours so the backup window issue disappears.

Managed archiving solves the hardware burden as well by eliminating the corporate need to manage the storage devices on which the static data resides. Instead this task falls to the MSP who maintain the backend hardware. Administrators set policies that establish what data is archived and end users access the data as usual with the file name doubling as a stub pointer to the offsite archive.

IT is just like everyone else, who wants to talk about and publicize problems when they have no answer for them? The combination of online backup and archiving offered by AmeriVault as part of its AmeriVault-DV data archiving service gives SMBs a new option to consider which they may find more palatable than many of the other solutions currently on the market.

Scott Bush, AmeriVault's Director of Marketing, and I regularly discuss over the phone current trends that are shaping the future of online backup. It was during one of these conversations that Scott just happened to mention that AmeriVault relies heavily on Internet search engines for lead generation.

Now I usually view Internet search engines as means for consumers to find information to make decisions and buy products. But the fact that AmeriVault generates many of its new business leads through the Internet indicates that companies, not just individuals, are also using the Internet as a source for making buying decisions. Where it gets difficult is how do individuals in businesses substantiate the quality of the information they are reading to make critical buying decisions?

I find this topic particularly intriguing because with most consumer products, you can research them to the nth degree and what makes them different. Whether it is Zest soap, Chef Boyardee ravioli or Jiff peanut butter, you can find nutrition information, where it was made, who uses it, how long it lasts under ultraviolet light before it starts to glow and, with some digging, how it compares and contrasts to other like products. But try to find current information about products and services that businesses buy, that information suddenly becomes difficult to come by.

Current information on online backup providers is especially difficult to find. On the surface, it might be easy to think that online backup providers are exactly alike, especially if one is not familiar with the space. However it quickly becomes evident that online backup providers refer to themselves as Managed Service Providers, or MSPs, because they do more than just backup data. Email and file archiving, hosted replication, data classification and disaster recovery are services that they either offer now or are considering for the future.

The possibility of SMBs obtaining these types of services from an MSP like AmeriVault is not so far-fetched. SMBs rarely have the time, money or staff to develop these data management disciplines themselves. Since MSPs are already managing their backup data and have become backup experts, they have easy access to SMB data and can can look to offer services like archiving, classification and disaster recovery. Since MSPs can support multiple clients, SMBs are better off leveraging the seasoned MSP expertise rather than bringing technologies in house that they have to learn, maintain, and dedicate valuable resources to. After all, don't most SMBs out-source their payroll? So the leap to out-sourcing their data management is not a big one to make.