The Ipod Backup Opportunity
Patrick Lannigan - Summer  2004

Larger companies (let's say over 500 employees) often have sophisticated backup technology that allows them to do backups onto a disk farm, coupled with offsite backups over high speed internet connections (for off-site storage). Small companies, like the one I currently work for, aren't so lucky. We still use tapes. Tape backup and restore is painful. Backups (like ours) are run at night and take four or more hours per system. Restores are even worse. It can take up to 6 hours to recover a single file from a tape. In the age of Ipod, where 40GB pocket-size devices can fit in your pocket, doing backups to tape feels infinitely stupid.

The opportunity is there for somebody to either use Ipod, or to come up with an Ipod-like device, to be used as "cartridges" for backup. They would, in all essence, be a faster tape drives. This would result in backups on our systems being reduced to less than two hours, while restores would be reduced to minutes (depending on the size of the file). The portability of an Ipod-like backup solution also makes it convenient for off-site storage because it fits in your pocket. There is a certain "security" in knowing that you can take your company's corporate data home at night just in case something happened to the building that houses your corporate computers.

The entrepreneur who wants to take on this challenge must focus on resellers, since that is the only way the small businesses, that are ideal for this type of solution, can be reached on a cost-effective basis. The "sell" shouldn't be too difficult since many of the existing backup solutions for small business are slow, unreliable, and error-prone. Better yet, a backup solution that also doubles as a real Ipod may be appealing to the very small business owner. That's right. You read it here. The next time you see somebody out walking or running with an Ipod, the smile on their face may not only be as a result of the music their listening to - but also because they have the security of knowing that their corporate data backup is safely tucked away in their pocket!

Don't laugh about selling an Ipod solution for backup and tunes. It wouldn't be the first time that solutions are sold for self'-serving reasons. It reminds of the time I was selling software in Ottawa. When laptops were introduced the requirement for laptops solutions in Ottawa surged. I always questioned whether these departments actually required these laptop applications, or if they just wanted them to justify a purchase for a laptop for their own use at home. There were similar circumstances for Oracle and Powersoft's PowerBuilder products. When these products were introduced the salaries for people who knew these technologies went sky high. As a result, there was more than one information technology department that purchased these technologies so they could gain expertise and therefore add this new talent to their resume.

© Patrick Lannigan, 2004

patrick at lannigan dot org

 

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