Several people have asked me to post a description of our infrastructure. As I mentioned in my previous post about HP’s infrastructure difficulties, "HP Upline and the challenge of large scale backup," keeping billions of files safe is no small task.

The first thing you should know about our architecture is that we never handle unencrypted data. Carbonite encrypts all files before they leave your PC. We use 448-bit Blowfish encryption. I’ve been told that Blowfish has never been cracked. It is the strongest commercial encryption on the market.

Carbonite employs the most sophisticated firewalls and intrusion detection systems available. We pay a professional hacker firm to attack the data center constantly, looking for security holes. I think our defenses are as good as most banks. Heise Security recently wrote about how they hacked into many of our competitors’ backup systems but were unable to hack into Carbonite Their so-called “Man-In-The-Middle” test attack is something we designed against from the beginning. Frankly, I was amazed that most of the other vendors were so easily hacked by these guys and backed up files either compromised or deleted.

At our secure data center, your data is stored on arrays of 1-terabyte enterprise-grade drives. Carbonite uses RAID-6 redundant arrays which spread copies of the data across multiple hard drives. Each array has 16 drives. Three of the 16 would have to fail simultaneously and the user’s PC would have to crash at the same time before any data would be lost. These RAID-6 arrays are 36,000,000 times more reliable than the hard drive in your computer. We have redundant power, redundant Internet connections, redundant Web servers and so forth. The data center is guarded 24 hours a day, seven days a week; and admission is controlled by fingerprint ID locks.

As you can imagine, we use a lot of bandwidth. We currently back up over 40 million new files every day and we have over 7 billion already backed up. Given the amount of bandwidth we use, it’s best to be located in a major telecoms center where multiple carriers converge. Therefore, we chose to build our data center in one of those so-called “bomb-proof” buildings with all the major Boston financial institutions and telcos.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite

Dave recently appeared on Fox Business News. In case you didn't have a chance to see it, you can stream it here on Fox Business News. Enjoy!

— Alison

Hi Everyone,

We're so excited that the Carbonite blog is up and running. There's been some great coverage on Carbonite recently and, for any of you that are interested, I thought I'd post the links here.

USA Today: Carbonite gets personal about backing up PC files

USA Today: Talking Tech Spotlight Video

Bootcamp Technology Show on Bloomberg Radio: Listen to an interview with David Friend

Spokesman Review: When hard drives fail: My experience shows you need to have a plan

I'll try to keep you posted as more coverage comes in.

Thanks!

— Alison

I’m David Friend, Carbonite’s co-founder and CEO. I’ve been asked to launch our new blog with a few words about the company, how we got started and what we are trying to achieve. I’m looking forward to being an active participant on this blog and hope you will take the time to do the same.

Jeff Flowers and I founded Carbonite in 2005. We got the idea because Jeff’s wife had her laptop stolen (it wasn’t backed up) and my daughter had a hard drive crash (she lost half a semester’s work). We couldn’t find a good solution for them, so we decided to build one ourselves.

In general, our design philosophy is “simple is better.” We prefer products like the iPod over things with tons of features but are hard to use. The problem we’re trying to solve with Carbonite is a simple one: any day we could lose everything on our computers. And we think this problem demands a simple solution. That’s why we created the first unlimited pricing plan in the backup industry – you don’t have to make any choices, and you never outgrow it. That’s why we made our backup continuous – most people want to backup as they go and not have to worry about leaving their computer on all night for some old-fashioned batch job to run. And most people want to know that their data is really safe, so we use the strongest commercial encryption available and we store our customers’ data on redundant disk arrays that are 36 million times more reliable than the hard drive in your computer. Our idea of a great product advance is figuring out how to eliminate an unnecessary feature (which adds needless complexity) by making it automatic so you don’t have to think about it.

Are we perfect? No. We have a long list of great ideas for ways to improve the service and we’re implementing them with each new release. Most of these ideas we get from our users (even more of an incentive for you to leave comments). Mostly we want things to be simpler, cleaner, more self-explanatory. Nobody we know really wants to “use” a backup system – they just want their data to be completely safe. So the easier the better.

In future blog posts, I’ll tell you about some of our challenges. Meanwhile, I’d like to hear from you: do you have thoughts or questions about the product, our service (I know, sometimes you have to wait to talk to a customer support rep – we’re working on it), or the people who make up our company?

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite