• Water Wheels and The Cloud Have More in Common Than You May Think

  September 07, 2010

  Historically, factories needed to generate their own power. For example, a water wheel may have been built to power a factory’s machinery, with the construction of the wheel and its operation and maintenance falling entirely on that business. At some point, these local generators were replaced with centralized power generation, where power was generated remotely, distributed as a utility, and priced based upon consumption. There are many reasons why this development was a good thing. Utilities presumably know how to generate power better because that is their primary business, there are economies of scale, the consumer can ramp up or down its consumption quickly and easily, and the consumer doesn’t have to pay for the excess capacity that the consumer does not need.

   

  From:  The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr

  I recently came across this excerpt and it got me to thinking about the data backup options available to today’s businesses.  Those who choose to manage their own backup are not unlike the early factory owners who generated their own power – entirely responsible for the operation and maintenance of a local backup system. Similarly, those who have migrated to an online backup solution, like Carbonite Pro, are like those factory owners who outsourced power consumption to a centralized utility service.  They are free to focus on their core business operations, while only paying for the amount of backup their business consumes each month. Just as the utilities trumped local power generation, I have no doubt that cloud-based services will soon be the defacto data backup method for businesses of all sizes, worldwide.

  As in the days of do-it-yourself power generation, do-it-yourself local backup carries with it inherent inefficiencies and hidden costs.  Here’s an example:  “Harold,” the owner of local company we interviewed (they are resellers for small business phone and data systems) has six computers in the office and three laptops that came and went with the sales people.  In theory all the computers are backed up to a local server with an external hard drive.  Once a week, Sally, the receptionist, had been taking the backup drive home where she swapped it out with the one from the previous week.  In theory, if a fire destroyed their building, they could recover everything to at least where it was the previous Friday. 

  But there were problems:  Sally would go on vacation and the backups wouldn’t get swapped while she was away.  The salespeople with laptops would forget to connect to the office network and start their backup processes.  Nobody ever checked the actual backups to see if they were actually getting done properly and could be restored.  Nobody even checked to see that the external hard drives were working.  The final straw came when Sally decided to leave the company and got into a dispute with her employer over severance.  She refused to return the backup drive until her demands were met. 

   
  Here are the differences between this common backup strategy and using an online backup service like Carbonite:

  • More efficient use of disk space:  Harold used 1TB external drives to back up a mere 20GBs of data, a 2% disk utilization.   A shared service like Carbonite can use more than 95% of its disk space.
  • Greater reliability:  External hard drives are notorious failure-prone – something like 3-4% failure rate per year.  Carbonite stores data on RAID6 redundant arrays that are theoretically 36 million times more reliable than a single drive. 
  • Safety:  The data on the drive in Sally’s basement was not encrypted.  If she lost it, somebody would have the whole company’s data.  Carbonite encrypts everything before it leaves the users’ PCs.  There is NO unencrypted data floating around. 
  • You know it’s working:  Unless you run tests on your external drive, you have no idea whether the backup is really usable.  Carbonite checks the integrity of every backed up file at the time it is stored and again every 3 months.  It will always work. 
  • Because Harold wasn’t in the backup business and really didn’t know much about backups, the whole process was risky, time consuming, and completely irrelevant to the core mission of his business.

  Keeping those water wheels working was completely irrelevant to making sweaters, or shoes, or machinery.  What a pain it must have been to mill owners in the 1800s.  It’s no wonder that they replaced those water wheels with electric motors as soon as they could.  The ones who didn’t eventually went out of business. 

  So it will be with backup.  It’s just a matter of time before people recognize that they are being penny wise but pound foolish with their data assets. 

  — Dave
  CEO, Carbonite

   

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• Jeff Flowers is named CTO of the Year

  November 09, 2009

  I am very pleased to announce that my long-time business partner and Carbonite CTO has won the coveted "CTO of the Year" award from the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. The award was given at a big dinner at the Boston Marriott last week, and we're very proud of Jeff. He joins a group of technology leaders from the Northeast that includes many of the pioneers of today's IT industry. Having worked with Jeff for more than 25 years through 4 other startups, it is impossible for me to contemplate starting a company without him. He's that rare combination of technical guru, sensible business head, and mentor for the technical team. Congratulations Jeff!

  
  

  — Dave
  CEO, Carbonite

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• News on the SwapDrive Acquisition

  June 12, 2008

  Although it didn't come as a surprise, the news about the SwapDrive acquisition has caused quite a stir in the industry.  Yesterday, we were in touch with eWeek and Backupreview.info, two sites that wanted to share Dave’s view on the acquisition.  eWeek published an article as well as a blog post that included much of what Dave posted on our blog yesterday. BackupReview.info also posted a Q & A to share Dave's thoughts with the online backup industry.

  In addition, we issued the following press release:

  June 11, 2008

  Online Backup Continues to Emerge Mainstream as Old Industry Giant
  Snaps up Another Established Backup Brand

  BOSTON — (BUSINESS WIRE) — David Friend, CEO and co-founder of online data backup company Carbonite, says online backup is continuing to emerge mainstream, as illustrated by another old industry giant gobbling up an established online backup player.

  Symantec acknowledged the truth of reports yesterday that it acquired SwapDrive and its companies, Backup.com and WhaleMail.com, leaving Carbonite as one of the last-standing large independent online backup services.

  “Frankly, I was surprised that the price was so low, given how hot this market is,” Friend said. “However, that's the danger of being a white label provider to someone like Symantec. It's like the lawnmower company that sells 80 percent of its output to a major retailer. One day they come along and make you ‘an offer you can’t refuse,’ so to speak.”

  In the past year, Mozy has been acquired by EMC and Arsenal Digital was acquired by IBM. In previous years Connected and LiveVault were acquired by Iron Mountain, and EVault was acquired by Seagate Technologies

  “The online backup space is hot and everyone is suddenly interested in getting into the game,” Friend said. “Symantec realized you can protect your PC with antivirus, anti-spyware, and so forth, but the most important thing to protect is your data. Only online backup provides that protection. No anti-anything can keep your hard drive from crashing or keep a burglar from stealing your computer.”

  Carbonite recently passed its 200 millionth file restored and has backed up more than three billion files for consumers and small businesses.

  “One by one our competitors have been snapped up by big old companies and we are standing alone as the top independent backup provider,” Friend said. “We’re poised to become the trusted brand in online backup, much like Norton emerged for anti-virus. With a simple and trustworthy product, we are in a position to continue our rapid growth.”

  About Carbonite

  Carbonite launched its Online PCBackup™ service in May 2006. Carbonite’s industry-first offer of unlimited backup space for a flat low price revolutionized the market for consumer and small business backup services. So far the company has backed up more than 2.5 billion files, has restored more than 160 million lost files for its customers and has a large data center where capacity is measured in petabytes. There are Carbonite users in nearly 100 countries.

  Founded in 2005, Carbonite believes that computer users should not have to think about backup. The company’s mission is to provide an affordable, reliable, secure and easy-to-use solution for the mainstream computer user. Carbonite is available to consumers and small business through numerous channels, including its corporate Web site, major US retailers and international distributors. For more information, please visit www.carbonite.com.

  
  

  — Alison

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• Symantec Buys SwapDrive for $123 Million

  June 11, 2008

  Symantec announced today that they have acquired Swapdrive for $123 million. Swapdrive is the white-label online backup company that has been providing the free 2GB offer that is included with every copy of Norton 360. Frankly, I was surprised that the price wasn't higher given how hot this market is. However, that's the danger of being a white-label provider to someone like Symantec. It's like the little lawnmower company that sells 80% of it's output to Sears. One day they come along and make you "an offer you can't refuse," so to speak.

  From what we hear, the take rate on the Norton 360 backup option has been pretty good. The bundle definitely makes sense: you can protect your PC with antivirus, anti-spyware, and so forth, but the most important thing is to protect your data. And only online backup provides that protection. No anti-anything can keep your hard drive from crashing or keep a burglar from stealing your computer.

  One by one our competitors have been snapped up by big old companies. LiveVault, EVault, Connected, and most of the old-line enterprise online backup companies have been bought. Mozy was recently bought by EMC for $76M. And now SwapDrive for a reported $123M.

  Our ambitions go far beyond the white-label strategy of Swapdrive. In the consumer space, Carbonite now has 11% brand recognition. Swapdrive is probably 0. Norton was one of the early providers of anti-virus software and built a brand that, for a while, was almost synonymous with anti-virus in the consumer and business markets. We’re trying to do the same thing with backup – that’s why you hear our endorsement ads on radio shows with hosts like Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, and others. In fact, I often tell our employees that we’re going to be to online backup what Norton is to anti-virus. While we have lots of co-marketing and reselling deals, it should be clear to everyone that one of our goals is to be the trusted brand name in online backup.

  The online backup space is hot. Everyone is suddenly interested in getting into the game. We just cut a deal with a leading PC manufacturer (announcement shortly) that is starting to ship their PCs with a free subscription to Carbonite pre-loaded. In a few years, online backup will be part of the pre-install on every PC. Why? Because when your hard drive crashes and you lose all your family pictures, you don’t blame Seagate or Western Digital – you blame your PC manufacturer. It’s a big brand liability issue for the PC manufacturers. Carbonite can make that problem go away for a PC manufacturer. Similarly, bundling online backup with anti-virus makes sense and we’re pursuing partnership deals.

  When you look out 5 years, I think almost everyone will be backing up their PC using services like Carbonite. Broadband is getting cheaper and faster, and disk storage costs are dropping like a rock. The alternatives don’t look very attractive: a) don’t backup and risk losing everything, b) buy an external hard drive. External hard drives are not ideal for backups because they usually sit right next to your computer, so if someone breaks in and steals your computer, or if it is damaged by fire, flood, or virus attack, both the computer and the hard drive will go bye-bye. Plus they are prone to failure (roughly 3% per year die) – a RAID6 array that stores your data at Carbonite is 36 million times more reliable than an external hard drive.

  We think Carbonite is a much better product than Swapdrive (we are of coursed biased in that regard) — it’s much simpler to use, and much less expensive.

  We just want to keep building the best online backup company in the world and hopefully take it public in a couple of years.

  
  

  — Dave
  CEO, Carbonite

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• Carbonite Data Center: Security, Encryption and Redundancy

  June 05, 2008

  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

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