Will 2015 Mark The End Of The Backup Appliance?

By Chris Schin, VP of Products, Zetta.net

And, if so, what does that mean for your margins?

Unless you are lucky enough to live in an area with underground utilities, a quick glance around the neighborhood will reveal a network of overhead power lines, strung between wooden poles. Atop many of those poles are the big round transformers needed to mediate the gap between the distribution line voltage and the 120v needed in the home. Those transformers, together with circuit breakers, are essential unless you want to fry every piece of equipment in the house and set the place on fire.

The History Of Bandwidth

For years, many companies needed the equivalent of such a transformer to make cloud backup possible: there was just too much of a difference between their Intranet and Internet bandwidth.  Here’s a little history: Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) hit the market in 1999 at a time when the consumers were largely using 56k dialup modems. Businesses might have a T-1 (1.54 Mbps) or T-3 (44.3 Mbps) connection.

Given the 600x speed difference between a GbE and a T-1, or even the 20x difference between GbE and a T-3, backing up data to a remote location required first storing it on a local backup system and then transmitting it at a slower speed the Internet connection could handle.

Cloud Backup Hits The Market

By the time cloud backup hit the market, while Internet speeds had improved, they were still no match for Ethernet, and so backup companies started introducing backup appliances to store the data until it could make it through the pipe to the cloud.

They did do the job, but also added thousands of dollars to the cost and maintenance of the backup service. But such backup appliances were rarely needed because of the lack of bandwidth, they were more likely needed because of factors such as inefficient data transfer protocols or bandwidth throttling on the receiving end.

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