What SMBs expect from backup software

Small and midsize businesses would rather chew tin foil, an industry pundit says, than spend money on enterprise backup software that is little suited to their needs. Senior Editor Deni Connor recently talked to George Symons, CEO of Yosemite Technologies, about what SMBs really need in backup software. This is an edited transcript.

Why don’t enterprise backup packages like Tivoli Storage Manager suit the needs of SMBs?

If you look at the difference between an SMB and an enterprise, generally within an SMB's IT department you either have fewer people or at a minimum you don't have people with specific storage specialization or storage knowledge, so because of that you need a product that is easy to use. A lot of the factors change dramatically -- in an SMB performance isn't critical, but the ability to easily install software is. To be able to start the software up, make it do what it should and let it keep running is the most important factor.

Do SMB backup packages differ from enterprise ones in their ease of use and installation?

Ease of use is number one. Taking the complexity out of a product is actually one of the most difficult things to do. I've worked with a number of enterprise products and the thought has always been, "We can make it simple, we can take out functionality and it will be easy to use." That's not really true -- you have to build ease of use from the ground up. It's not just an intuitive GUI, but understanding and thinking about what defaults to set, how to figure out what the environment is so you can completely automate the processes. It's that automation that is so much different than in enterprise products, and you can successfully do it because the complexity of the environment is so different.

Is there also a difference in the price? I heard someone say that an SMB would rather chew tin foil than spend a lot of money on backup.

I have heard that, too. There is an absolute difference in price. If you look at an SMB environment that ranges from a SOHO to a 100-person organization, the cost is going to be widely different across those. Just looking at a basic backup server you can see differences of 10 to one. So SMB software needs to be significantly less expensive.

Is the notion that users can retrieve their files important in SMBs?

It is important. It goes back to the point of limited IT resources. You don't have someone who is dedicated to backup and recovery, let alone to managing storage. So if I need to recover files, there is no one to go to. For that user, self service becomes critical. If a server crashes, clearly IT is going to do the recovery, but if it's my user files, I want to be able to recover them myself. If I'm a mobile user, no one wants to help me, so there really does have to be self service.

It would seem to me that SMB customers would be more comfortable with disk-based backup than they would be with tape. Is that true?

It is true for a couple of reasons. They are more comfortable with it because they already have disk in the environment and again, tape adds an additional level of complexity. But it is also just the management of it. A lot of SMBs will be happy with just a backup on a local disk, and that's a risk they take in not having an offsite tape archive. So they are not even worried about taking tapes offsite to protect them or tape rotation policies or the complexities of managing tapes. For SMBs disk is very applicable. We saw it catching on in SMBs even before that of enterprises for just those reasons.