Business Solutions, January 2003 | By Ed Miseta

Selling a customer a $100,000 tape backup solution can be a tough task, especially when funds are not available to pay for it. The Department of Youth Services for the state of Ohio was one of those customers. From its central location in Columbus, an IT administrator was trying to manage the computer systems of six different youth facilities and make sure a proper backup was being performed. "When you have remote sites to manage, the problem is you are not sure personnel at those sites are doing the backups correctly, provided they are doing them at all," says Tony Scicluna, director of sales for integrator Rave Computer Association, Inc. (Sterling Heights, MI). "That creates a problem since there is no way of knowing if all of the data at those sites is getting backed up and is protected."

The head of youth services wanted to be able to manage all of the backups from his location in Columbus and have all of the data backed up to his location as well. There was also no disaster recovery plan in place. If something happened to any of those six locations, a backup copy of the data did not exist off-site. Unfortunately, money was also a concern.

Tape Libraries Are Too Expensive
Each site was doing its own backup with a tape drive connected to a server. At first it seemed that acquiring backup software and a tape library with the capacity to hold all of the data (approximately 1 TB) would be the best solution. The cost of such a system quickly put that idea to rest. "The customer had been in discussions with other companies for over a year, but those solutions were too costly," says Scicluna. "Most of the solutions he looked at were more than $100,000." Then the administrator became aware of disk-to-disk (D2D) backup and called Nexsan Technologies (Woodland Hills, CA). Nexsan passed the lead on to Scicluna, who immediately went to work selling the D2D technology.

"I went to the customer and did a presentation on D2D backup, how it works, how the software functions, and the overall benefits," he says. "They had a lot of questions about the technology. D2D is not new, but many end users are not very familiar with the whole concept of backing up to disk as opposed to tape. They wanted to know how the technology works, whether we had any references, what kind of return policy we had, and what kind of after-sale support we offered."

D2D Saves Time, Money, Bandwidth
Scicluna was able to close the sale by offering a D2D solution for under $40,000. The solution incorporated ATAboy disk arrays from Nexsan, along with Nexsan's D2D software. "ATAboy is an ATA [advanced technology attachment] RAID [redundant array of independent disks] 5 storage array that is very cost-effective," he says. "ATAboy provides disk storage at less than a penny per megabyte. Tape usually runs around 2 to 3 cents per megabyte, so it was more cost-effective to go with a disk solution than a tape library. Customers also do not have the cost of media associated with tape libraries or the man-hours to swap the tapes in and out."

Unlike tape backup, D2D software requires the customer to perform only one full backup of the data. After the initial backup is performed, only file changes are required to be backed up. "The state of Ohio had a WAN [wide area network] infrastructure in place, but bandwidth usage was still important to them," says Scicluna. "This solution also uses less bandwidth since the customer is not performing a full backup every time. A software agent residing on a server at the remote sites will scan the disks for file changes and then send only those changes to the host site to be backed up."

Add Disaster Recovery To The Solution
Although Scicluna's solution was less than half the price of tape solutions, he was still able to provide the customer with one additional benefit: disaster recovery. "This is something the customer was not even considering at first," he says. "The main concern was consolidation and being able to back up data to a central site. But our solution also included another ATAboy array at a different site that replicated all of the data in Columbus. If the Columbus facility was destroyed, all the data would be safe at a different location. With a tape library, a duplicate set of tapes would have to be made and then manually moved off-site."

The biggest challenge to VARs selling a D2D solution is customer education. "People are just used to backing up to tape because for many years that was really the only available means of cost-effective backup," says Scicluna. "For many years disk was just too expensive." Scicluna explains to customers how the cost of disk solutions has come down so far that it is actually less expensive than using tape. Customers are already storing their data on disk, and this solution allows them to copy their data from one disk to another. Once Scicluna gets past explaining why he can offer D2D for such a low price, disk storage begins to make sense to the customer. He notes that speed is also a huge selling point. D2D solutions move data at disk speed. The only bottleneck users will encounter is in the network. Scicluna estimates transfer rates for D2D solutions are about four times faster than for tape.

D2D has storage uses other than just backup. Scicluna believes it is a good fit for customers needing to store large amounts of data. "Geoscience companies, like those involved in oil exploration, are the perfect customers," he adds. "They have a lot of data they need to store, but they do not need a lot of speed." Scicluna states a D2D solution is not as fast as an enterprise disk array using Fibre Channel drives, but will meet the needs of customers needing additional storage capacity. He also believes D2D is a good solution for improving data protection plans. But the biggest play will be in small- to medium-sized businesses that have not been able to afford enterprise-class data protection.

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