Add Online Server Backup—Not Another Appliance

Zetta Takes the Headache Out of Backup By Not Requiring New Appliances

By Nick Mueller, Zetta.net

VNMZE52512 — Each of the prospective SME IT customers that we talk to everyday has a unique environment, a unique set of data protection challenges, and operates within a unique business context. During these conversations, after we get past the initial questions about bandwidth (5-10Mbps at the least) and data size (1TB or more), the discussion moves toward finding the optimum way to do server backup in their unique context.

This is usually when the topic of competitors’ solutions comes up. Thanks to the history of server backup development there are a lot of legacy disk backup vendors that have responded to the cloud computing revolution by adding an extra feature or two that lets customers who buy a local disk backup appliance pay just a little more to send that data offsite to the vendor’s data center.

Zetta’s online server backup service doesn’t require buying any new appliances, because we’re about taking the headaches out of backup – and more hardware is a headache.

What’s wrong with backup appliances?

The 2 inherent flaws with the approach of using appliances for backup:

1. An appliance is a single point of failure – a drive failure or disaster scenario will render your backup data unreachable. Sure, most reputable vendors will try overnighting a new appliance per the terms of the SLA, but if the office in question has been affected by a tornado, hurricane, or earthquake – FedEx is probably not going to make it.

2. It takes too long for data to be moved offsite – The main reason that most vendors want to sell you a backup appliance in the first place is that their data transfer technology isn’t fast enough to complete a backup in reasonable time. The appliance is a convenient “waiting room” for your data before it gets trickled out to the vendor’s data center via their proprietary API.

Why doesn’t Zetta’s solution need an appliance?

With Zetta all of the equipment is in our data center. There’s no single point of failure there. As long as you have your network connection up you can use Zetta.

1. Fast data transfers using WebDAV – a protocol that works over HTTP, just like the internet itself. What makes it efficient is that WebDAV is not only bundled into every major operating system, once the initial file transfer is completed the only thing that has to be transferred are any changes to the data in the file, as opposed to backing up the entire file all over again.

2. Your file system is replicated in our data center – Drives, file directories, and folders all look just like they do on your local network. Since we don’t store your data in a proprietary backup format, we don’t need you to buy an appliance to restore it. This means that the data is available for recovery from any browser. It also means remote employees can recover that single file they accidentally deleted without calling IT to do it for them.

So there you have it. Appliance-based online server backups are not particularly suited to the cloud or to disaster recovery for businesses of any size. If you disagree for any reason, give us a call and we’ll be happy to discuss the various benefits of backup technology with you at length. And before you ask – no, we don’t have a soapbox – we don’t sell boxes, that’s the point.


Nick is Zetta's Corporate Reporter, and has been writing and telling stories about technology with blogs, social media, and content marketing since the days when the BBS reigned.

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URLs embedded in this article
• Is Cloud Backup Right for You?: http://bit.ly/xHTJjn
• Online Server Backup—Tape and Appliance are Not the Droids You’re Looking For: http://bit.ly/LiA2Rs
• WebDAV: http://bit.ly/t1CHW
• Contact Zetta: http://bit.ly/p8vq6X

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