Cloud storage and its efficacy in the real-world backup arena

[Logicalis_PAF]

Hello everyone,

  My company is verging into the cloud backup storage arena with the Riverbed SteelStore appliance.  Major limitation in my view is that it is a basic disk storage unit only.  Granted, it would take some dramatic coding to make it appear as a local volume to the media server, or would have to seem like a SAN or DAS disk in order for Advance Disk to be able to use it, but it just seems like the limitation of not being able to use SLPs, let alone it not being catalogued media, would mostly preclude its use. 

  Having said all of that, I wanted to pose the question to see what others are using this non-SLP-friendly storage for?  I imagine that archiving would be one use, but I guess a dodgy-DR scenario would be possible too.  Let me know what use you see basic disk cloud-based storage units providing to you or others in practicality.

Thanks!

Pat

[INT_RND]

I have exposure to a large number of enterprise level companies. Nobody is doing this. I have seen people duplicate to off-site disk but they all use MSDP with optimized duplication. This drastically reduces the number of bits sent across the WAN.

Tape is still the best solution for most companies.

Cloud storage is not a good idea for people who have large datasets.

[jim_dalton]

I think this has been covered elsewhere on the forum Pat: I recall a summary of it was: backup can be fine, make sure you can actually restore effiiciently ie RTO met for all scenarios.

What are the business limitations/expectations?

Will this get used for DR?

Do you have a fully developed plan for DR that includes getting access at DR to these data, ie via another data access point?

No shortage of challenges to consider.

Jim