Ask your friends who don’t work in IT infrastructure if they think what we do is exciting. If you’re like me you aren’t friends with this type of muggle. So try asking the parents of your kids friends. I’m pretty sure that they would rate our working world of IT infrastructure as dull. So it’s nice when we get to see something a little more exciting, like destroying things with thermite. A few of these normal people will be Mythbusters fans and may have seen burning Thermite cut a car in half and explode on contact with ice. But have they seen a storage device destroyed with Thermite? We have, first DeepStorage destroyed a node in a Gridstore cluster and last month Datto destroyed a NAS. OK, I know it’s no James Bond stunt but it is better than a PowerPoint presentation, even a little better than a whiteboard.
Datto’s products are backup appliances that include a hypervisor for immediate restore and cloud replication for DR. The appliance on your site is a backup store and allows restores into your VMs or physical machines. The appliance also allows whole machine recovery as a VM running on the appliance. They have a range of physical devices starting with an Intel NUC for small businesses up to a fairly large NAS, larger devices support more backup capacity and more concurrent VMs for DR restore. They also have their own cloud, hardware in 5 datacentres across the US and around the world. Backups from your appliance are replicated to the cloud and should the original machine and appliance fail then the backups can be recovered to VMs on the Datto cloud. Backup as a Service combined with DR as a Service and sized for SMB.
I am quite interested in Datto’s product as a possible way to protect the Demitasse Lab. My lab is a couple of hosts sitting in a co-lo near where I live. Currently I use Veeam to backup VMs from my ESXi server to my Windows physical machine in the lab. This leaves me very exposed to the destruction of the co-lo. One fire, flood, or earthquake would destroy the primary machines and the backups. Having a copy of my backups in Datto’s cloud would provide offsite backup with the added benefit of being able to restore my VMs into Datto’s cloud.
© 2015, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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