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Partnering
AT&T is not unique in merging its network sales efforts with disaster recovery programs. It has joined most large telecommunications firms and alternative carriers. More often than not, to round out their disaster recovery services portfolio, networking firms end up joining ranks with companies specializing in disaster recovery - companies such as SkyDesk, Iron Mountain, and SunGard.
As far as Yipes is concerned, its existing relationship with Lightbridge is a prelude to greater things. Yipes, which filed for Chapter 11 in March, has a relationship with Level 3 for colocation in major cities, and a revenue sharing agreement with SkyDesk - better known to Internet surfers as the company behind the $99 per month @Backup service. If customers like Lightbridge were to consider getting a third-party provider for online backup, Yipes is ready to offer its services.
Yipes executives find their relationship with SkyDesk works well when SkyDesk competes against carriers that rely on older network technologies.
"When they walk into a large organization that needs to bring in an OC-3 for $25,000 per month and SkyDesk offers their disaster recovery service, with Yipes as a transport mechanism, with a 10 Mbps connection at about $1,000 a month, which offer do you think will seal the deal?" asks Terry Szucsko, vice president of Web services at Yipes.
Competition aside, merging disaster recovery services with inexpensive bandwidth gives shape to a long discussed issue in online disaster recovery: When should companies ditch tape in favor of bandwidth? Recording data on tape is less expensive in the long run, and companies like SkyDesk and Iron Mountain end up recording data the old fashioned way even if they capture it via high-speed pipes. It becomes a question of economics, and hard drives are still more expensive than tape for storing data for years at a time.
Backing-up online, however, has the one big advantage of instant gratification. With tape backups, restoring data can take several days. Yipes, with its on-demand pipes, can roll out online disaster recovery - which could entail downloading the entire server configuration - with a couple of clicks on the keyboard.
The next big frontier is bound to revolve around service level guarantees, as Web hosts like Cervalis enter the market with lots of quality datacenter space.
"We don't compete on price; we want to compete on the quality of our services. Because we don't do 100-to-1 overbooking, we can guarantee the space to customers when they need it," says Zack Margolis, vice president of marketing and business development at Cervalis (www.cervalis.com).
Lightbridge started out by using 45 Mbps point-to-point leased lines for limited data replication, along with backing-up its data on tape with Iron Mountain. Currently, it uses Yipes for instantaneous fail-over as an option for their customers. The attraction is in paying less for better quality bandwidth, but Lightbridge is hedging its bets and using multiple means of ensuring that they will not lose their data, even if the worst should happen. But if Lightbridge ever does move away from tape backup, the employees will miss their daily courier visit - there is just something inherently cool about armored cars.
Max Smetannikov wrote this article for HostingTech, a web hosting magazine, and can be contacted at msmetannikov@hostingtech.com
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