True Disaster Recovery in a Cloud Storage Environment

Recent news articles have discussed the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of a large cloud storage provider. This cloud storage provider marketed itself as completely safe, with up to 5 physical locations for customer data, and a large amount of venture financing to insure continuity.  That bankruptcy left several large customers with only 2-4 weeks to retrieve data that took months or years to store.  Speculation is that there could be upwards of 20 petabytes of data that need to be retrieved from those systems, and now that data access is in the hands of a bankruptcy court.

Obviously, in a cloud environment, as this case shows, disaster is not limited to fire or flood, but also includes insolvency of your provider.  Even if the data is read out from the cloud storage to another storage device at 1gigabit per second, it could take years before all data can be safely transferred.  But in the meantime, access to your valuable data is constantly in jeopardy and out of your control.

This is one of the reasons that Open Source Storage uses OSVault and tape-based archival for our storage systems.  The other reasons are cost and reliability.  With dedicated tape volumes per customer, and having those volumes owned by our customers, we can move a complete set of data from our site to another site in less than one day.  We use open formats to store data, so that moving to other vendors does not require complex and costly manual processes.  And our costs of storage are still 75% less than other cloud storage providers.

Tape-based archives give us some distinct, valuable advantages.  We can make second copies and move those second copies offsite for very little incremental cost (about $10 per terabyte capital cost and less than $.05 per terabyte storage cost per year).  Accidental or deliberate deletion of data is difficult or impossible since we keep maps of all data stored on tape in multiple locations and do not recycle tapes so that even deleted data can be recovered.  And we can grow our systems from small to large without expensive or time consuming hardware replacement or upgrades.

As an exercise, we implemented a 500TByte disaster recovery to a separate location.  The total cost of the additional hardware was less than $20,000 (although we had already purchased the hardware as part of our disaster planning).  The total time required to get access to all files in the 500TByte file system was less than one day.

So, when planning your cloud-based or in-house storage environment, please consider the following issues in your disaster recovery planning:

• Is my data stored in two separate locations, to safeguard against flood, fire and other disasters?
• Is my data safe from individual actions, either mistakes or deliberate?
• Can I get my data physically relocated without costly or time consuming effort?
• Do I have the resources and trained personnel to implement a disaster recovery?
• Is access to my data completely within my control during any disaster?