re:<<Other site executives
expressed serious concerns about depending on the performance of a
single hosting company or network. These executives believe that the best
means of ensuring reliability is to spread the risk among multiple hosting
and network providers. >>
So how do they do this, short of full, synchronized duplication? How do they synchronize their data across hosting companies so that if one goes down, the other doesn't miss a beat and has all the same up-to-date records? Or, do they do nightly mirror copies, then if one site goes down, just transfer the data so far that day and in a fairly short time the second one is up to date? One is an instantaneous switch, the other has a lag and is probably lower cost.
The lagged method might not always work, depending on the nature of the failure. It may, however, be sufficient for certain types of sites.
Seems there's a good opportunity for hosting companies to have exclusive peering arrangements with other hosting companies. Each one backs the other up, and they both share the revenues. From a customer standpoint that's probably attractive too since the customers don't have to evaluate multiple companies for their backup.
The trouble is, of course, overcoming the greedy "I want it all" attitude. Seems the hosting companies should realize the desire for uncorrelated backup and adopt this at some point. In fact it may result in more total customers that they could have had alone due to the convenience it provides over non-peered hosting companies.
Somewhere in this mess there may even be an opportunity for a satellite link handling strictly the backup traffic exchange between peered hosts. Can get much more uncorrelated to ground-based problems than that. An enterprising satellite operator might just want to try and create such arrangements, rather than leaving it to the hosting companies to come to them.
dh |
