Like many of you, I’ve viewed the cloud computing backup hype with rolling eyes.  Tonight I viewed a presentation by Amazon S3 executive that, while 45 minutes long, I felt was worth sharing.  It convinced me the cloud computing backup is coming soon… and it may be something you want to watch in quiet time off hours, but it’s pretty jaw dropping:

The 2^nd half started to get into some database stuff I didn’t fully understand.  As IT pros, I think we all tend to be skeptical about “the cloud”. The graph below (from his presentation) should convince you something is going on here.  Listening to what they’re doing you start to grasp how many advantages they have:

1. They don’t pay the Cisco premium for networking – they have designed their own switches and routers
2. They don’t pay the HP premium for servers – they have designed their own servers  (and he points out their servers are faster and they don’t pay 30% to “the channel” – to purchase servers interesting number)
3. They don’t pay the EMC premium for storage – they have designed their own storage
4. They bypass network software stack overhead by creating virtual NICs and stacks. (new)
5. They don’t pay VMWare or Microsoft for operating systems and failover clusters.  They design their own failover systems
6. They don’t pay for bandwidth, they bypass the AT&Ts and others by buying their own private fiber links
7. They design their own power stations (last slides)

Summary:  Moving forward backing up both to and from the cloud will be an important part of data retention strategies.  The Netswap Plus NAS gives you the ability to do so with no monthly fees.  Cloud computing backup will become critical to insure that data in the cloud has a redundant copy locally.  We will be introducing more ways to do this.