Microsoft, Iron Mountain Enable Cloud Backup & Recovery

11:00 AM -- Microsoft and Iron Mountain recently announced a cloud-based backup-and-recovery solution for Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007. It provides a powerful new option for business customers to perform disaster recovery over the Internet.

To put this into context, last month Microsoft announced the addition of Service Pack 1 (SP1) to DPM 2007, the backup-and-recovery software solution that is part of the company's ongoing strategy to cover more of its customers' business requirements with Microsoft software functionality. DPM 2007 SP1 offers a number of new features, such as expanded capabilities for SQL Server, SharePoint, and Hyper-V protection, in addition to already existing capabilities for other key Microsoft products.

This latest announcement by Microsoft and Iron Mountain consists of DPM 2007 cloud backup powered by the Iron Mountain CloudRecovery solution. Previously, DPM customers had two narrow choices for backup and recovery -- onsite to disk and/or tape. Now they have a third option: offsite backup and restore to an Iron Mountain-mirrored PCI-Compliant data center site using the CloudRecovery solution. However, customers still have to use DPM locally to create the primary copy of data. That is, they cannot use the off-premises Iron Mountain site as their primary storage site. In essence, the new offering allows businesses to use the Iron Mountain cloud as a disaster recovery site for data storage.

This is what Microsoft defines as an "attached solution." Iron Mountain places an agent on a local DPM server. A user can then see the Iron Mountain solution as a separate data source (i.e., a place from which data can be recovered after it has been backed up) through the DPM user interface. The solution is attached because it appears to be an integral part of DPM, meaning that it is designed to be easy to use. This is in contrast with what Microsoft calls a "pure play" solution, where a user would simply place a separate agent or program on a server and backup directly to the cloud, limiting or eliminating the need for onsite storage.

Now, in developing new offerings, Microsoft has an advantage that many companies would kill for: It can always get more than enough potential users to test its proposed products and give feedback. Some 45 early adopters of SP1 (consisting largely of midsized and large companies) were asked to give feedback on both options and by general consensus favored the attached solution. This is entirely understandable. In contrast, most really small companies and individuals prefer a pure-play solution as a remote backup over the Internet as it saves them the trouble of managing a local backup system yet still gives them a reliable and overall professional solution.However, midsized and large companies already had local solutions in place (otherwise they wouldn't be using DPM in the first place) and likely didn't feel comfortable giving up their existing disk/tape backup solutions. But they seemed to welcome using cloud computing for disaster recovery, which is also understandable. Cloud computing offers an economical and easy way of storing backup data for disaster recovery purposes. However, recovering data from a local copy is faster than recovering over a network, a critical point for problems that fall far short of being a disaster, but still require recovery.

Still, the question remains why organizations would want a cloud computing backup solution if they already have disaster recovery sites in place? Note that the Iron Mountain CloudRecovery solution is only for storage, so in the case of a disaster that made the primary site unavailable for a longer than acceptable period of time, someone would have to load the Iron Mountain agent onto a DPM server at an entirely new or different site, then recover the data over the Internet. The primary reason, then, for using CloudRecovery is that the burden of managing secondary storage is transferred to a third-party services supplier, namely Iron Mountain. That greatly simplifies the need and eliminates the costs of deploying and maintaining a complex DR site.

However, there is another important reason that can make CloudRecovery a great deal for customers. Backup data also supports compliance and governance purposes where proving the authenticity of the data or preserving it for civil litigation cases or e-discovery is critical. Iron Mountain has long played the role of a trusted third party as custodian of data, as well as providing other capabilities and services that can help users meet compliance and governance requirements. For example, Stratify, a subsidiary of Iron Mountain, has announced an e-discovery disaster recovery protocol. Although that is an effort separate from CloudRecovery, the principle would seem to be that the user is at least halfway there if the data is already in an Iron Mountain site.

What to call the new Microsoft/Iron Mountain solution is "interesting." Backing up data via cloud computing is as useful a process as it is over a private network. However, SaaS (software-as-a-service) is another useful term to consider in this context, since together Microsoft's DPM and Iron Mountain's CloudRecovery qualify as a cloud-enabled storage-as-a-service (also SaaS!). And, by the way, the pair's solution also qualifies as e-vaulting -- electronic vaulting that replaces the need for the traditional vaulting of magnetic tapes or other physical media transported from onsite to offsite. While Iron Mountain has been a leader in the vaulting business for years, this new solution allows it to replace it with e-vaulting.

Microsoft benefits from this effort because it makes the DPM solution more valuable to customers by leveraging it across three data sources (disk, tape, and cloud) instead of two. The effort should also help Microsoft make inroads into the SaaS market and share revenues from Iron Mountain. Microsoft also gets a trusted partner with a reputation for delivering high-quality and highly reliable solutions. Along with working with Microsoft on joint development, marketing and sales efforts, Iron Mountain has an authorized tap into the DPM portion of the Microsoft customer base where it could build relationships and further business. That is what is known as a very good deal.Moving data backup to the cloud is likely to become an ever-growing trend for both cost and easing of the administrative burden of managing secondary remote storage. Being able to do this transparently through the use of existing backup-and-restore software is very desirable. First, customers can continue to use their existing investments in DPM, which includes not only cost but also the working knowledge invested in an ongoing process. Secondly, customers receive an easy way to get high-quality and cost-effective backup storage for disaster recovery purposes. Overall, we believe that the combined Microsoft DPM 2007 and Iron Mountain CloudRecovery solution offers a good value and is likely a sign of things to come.

David Hill is principal of Mesabi Group LLC, which focuses on helping organizations make their complex storage, storage management, and interrelated IT infrastructure decisions easier by making the choices simpler and clearer to understand.