Despite the speed and reliability benefits, Taneja feels that Idealstor's technology may be more relevant for SMBs than large enterprises. "I suspect that it would have the largest appeal to the SMB customers where a 750-Gbyte disk drive would be enough for months of stuff," he explains. "I don't see anybody using this if they have 20 Tbytes of backup data."
Larger firms looking for the speed of disk backup are likely to consider a high capacity appliance, according to Taneja. (See VCs Add $15M More to Data Domain A Storage App Without the Storage and Data Domain Gains Patent .) "I would suspect that if you have got terabytes and terabytes of data, then the customer would be likely to buy a Sepaton, Data Domain, or Diligent Technologies solution where the data stays on disk at the local site and is then replicated to a disk-based system at another remote site," he says.
Users relying on removable disk drives, of course, also run the risk of losing media in transit as has already happened to a number of firms, including Iron Mountain and Time Warner, which suffered a high profile tape snafu. (See Tape Security Trips Up Users and Can't Quite Kick the Tape Habit.)
National Renal's Doom admits that this is a worry, although he told Byte and Switch that he has his own solution to this problem. "I choose to have our guys be responsible for taking the disk drives off-site rather than using a service from another company," he explains. "If I have got someone's patient data, I can't just allow that to fall off the back of a truck."
Idealstor told Byte and Switch that Microsoft's Windows Server, running on the Backup Appliance and FrankeNAS boxes, can also be used to encrypt the disks before they are sent off site.
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