SMBs want disaster recovery

I spent most of last week in Long Beach, Calif., at the StorageWorld Conference. There are just so many of these meetings that I can attend each year and still maintain what little is left of my sanity, so I had missed this annual gathering in the past. Shame on me. It was an interesting conference, better than most.  I’ll be going back.

I was there to run two panels. The first, on storage for small and midsize businesses, had an interesting mix of leading vendors participating: EMC (Danz), FalconStor, HP, IBM, IntraDyn and LiveVault. As you might expect, after the vendors made their pitches (I kept them to about two minutes each – have you ever seen a vendor try to limit his presentation to two minutes, no slides allowed?) and some questions and answers between the panel and me, the most important part of the session came when the audience chipped in with their own questions and commentary.

One interesting point that came out of those audience questions is that there seems to be a big need for disaster recovery solutions at this level – but those solutions had better be cheap. Most sites want disaster recovery without the expense of investing in a second set of storage devices for the secondary site. It is clear from this that for much of the SMB market replication to a remote site is not an option they wish to exercise, although sending data to a remote service provider may fill the bill.

Another interesting point from the SMB panel: when I polled the audience on their back-up strategies, I asked how many of them turned on the “verify” option during backups? The answer: one person out of an audience of about 100 said his site did. Considering their interest in disaster recovery, this is curious phenomenon.

My second panel, on disaster recovery, was a real pleasure. I had IT managers from three quite different firms on the panel. Based on what I heard, it would seem that the corporate data at Roetzal and Andress (a legal firm), Securian Financial, and Southwestern Gas is in good hands.

In one sense IT the guys from those firms had an easier time of it – while vendors on panels are often seen as the enemy, the audience here enjoyed the give-and-take with three of their own, and their response was very gratifying. One negative point about the audience however: when I asked them the same question about the “verify” option, the attendees (mostly from larger companies this time) didn’t fare much better. If I remember correctly, only about 10% of the audience verified that the back-up data was recoverable.

To those of you who attended and stopped by our panels, thanks. Your comments during the Q&A and in the aisles after the sessions were valued contributions to the meetings. To my readers who stopped by with a kind comment about the column, thanks for your thoughtfulness – the check is in the mail.

Next time: what was hot at the StorageWorld Conference, and which major vendor did something really, really stupid.