Semi-OT Storage Vendors Push Hosted Services
By MIKE KOLLER, InternetWeek
Jul 24, 2000
URL: internetwk.com
A growing number of storage service providers are emerging to let e-businesses archive Web content and transactional data at hosted facilities, offering an alternative to onsite storage management systems. Creek Path Systems, a spin-off of Exabyte, this week became the latest nationwide SSP, providing backup, migration, archiving, copying and other outsourced storage services.
Also this week, Intira Corp. said it's working with EMC Corp. to provide hosted storage services. IT shops that subscribe to its service will receive predictable reliability through service level agreements, said Agnes LaMont, an Intira product manager. Through its SLAs, the company is guaranteeing 99.95 percent application availability.
In recent months EMC has been aggressively lining up SSPs. The company's new e-Infrastructure Service Provider Program is intended to identify service providers EMC deems qualified to deliver managed storage services.
One key outsourcer that recently signed up to offer storage services through EMC is EDS, which launched a service similar to Intira's.
Intira's service will run on EMC's storage systems software and networking products, such as Celerra (for network attached storage), Connectrix, SRDF, PowerPath and TimeFinder, said Kerry Dolan, manager of e-business marketing at EMC.
The downside to SSPs is they tend to be more costly than hosting storage systems internally, said Dataquest/Gartner Group analyst Adam Couture. EMC hardware is very expensive, and the customer could potentially come up with a much cheaper solution by deploying storage hardware from other vendors, Couture said.
But for Teveo Inc., a developer of Webcam software and digital video systems, finding a quick and reliable way to archive its data was more of a concern.
The company decided to outsource its storage management to Intira because its 35 staffers couldn't lay in the infrastructure and focus on their other responsibilities, said Web technology architect Joyce Cooper.
"It would have been very, very difficult to get a site up and running and managed that had the capacity we would need," Cooper said. "If we have 20,000 to 100,000 cameras simultaneously feeding information to us, we could be talking about two to 30 terabytes of data we're managing."
Joseph Kovar, section editor for sister publication CRN, contributed to this story.
I guess this is partly why EMC says tape is dead.
Jim |
