As Tropical Storm Isaac barrels across the Gulf of Mexico on its way most likely to the same places that were in the direct path of Hurricane Katrina seven years ago, a lot of IT people might not be inclined to take a tropical storm as seriously as a hurricane.
In terms of wind, there is a world of difference between a Category 5 hurricane and a tropical storm that might reach Category 1. But what many people don’t appreciate is that because tropical storms move slower, they tend to leave a lot more water in their wake. And as most IT professionals will tell you, it’s not so much the wind that does all the damage as much as it is all the water.
Against that backdrop, Quantum today at the VMworld 2012 conference formally launched its cloud backup service. Q-Cloud is based on a virtual appliance that IT organizations deploy locally to manage the backup process. That virtual appliance then replicates those files to Q-Cloud, which is hosted in data centers managed by Xerox on behalf of Quantum.
According to Rob McDonald, director of product marketing for Quantum cloud solutions, one of the things that differentiates Q-Cloud most is that Quantum has driven the price of backup in the cloud down to one to five cents per GB per month, depending upon the level of data deduplication that can be achieved using the Quantum backup appliances. At those price points, McDonald says that Quantum is delivering enterprise-grade backup services at price points that rival cloud backup services aimed at consumers.
One issue that has limited the adoption of backup and recovery software in the cloud has obviously been cost, which has a tendency to quickly escalate as the amount of data involved starts to grow. At the price points being offered by Quantum, however, cloud backup becomes much more affordable for the average organization. You may wonder why most organizations haven’t moved their backup services to the cloud. The two primary reasons have been total cost and the complexity of setting up the environment, both of which are now finally being addressed.
