Not Backup-as-a-Service, but just cloud-storage that could be used to supplement a backup. Sure, there are a lot of STaaS (storage-as-a-service) folks that will give you a small amount of capacity to try their platform, knowing full well that you are going to want more and be willing to pay for it.
But there used to be a company that would give you as much storage in the cloud as you wanted – Symform. Symform was my 2011 “Coolest Disruptive Technology that most folks hadn’t heard of yet” award winner.
Essentially, Symform would make a copy of some subset of your data, encrypt it, shatter it into 64 chunks, add 32 parity chunks, and then scatter those pieces into the Internet – specifically, onto 96 remote/nameless locations. As long as any 64 of the 96 locations were accessible, you data was accessible in the cloud. The catch: you needed to offer some of your local storage to store 1/96th of other folks’ data. So, you could quite literally go purchase a 3TB USB hard drive from a local retailer, throw it in/on your server, and then get 3TB of cloud-based storage – I know, because I did it with my own environment. Sure, if you needed more capacity than you wanted to offer, you could pay for it – but the idea that I could buy cheap, slow local storage and gain durable, tertiary cloud-based storage was really interesting.
The reason that I bring up Symform is because they were just acquired by Quantum, who also offers deduplicated disk (DXi appliances, both virtual and physical), tape solutions and another cloud offering (Q-Cloud). We’ll see if the mechanics and service model changes, now that they are part of a broader portfolio of data protection offerings from a commercial vendor, but the idea that such a different and potentially exciting technology will now be available to a much broader set of customers and service providers will be interesting to watch. Congrats to Quantum.
As always, thanks for reading.
Originally posted on my personal self-managed blog while at ESG (TechnicalOptimist.com), reposted on DPM for archival reference. Broken links are likely due to ESG content being dropped between its acquisition by TechTarget and their acquisition by Omdia.