RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 46

by William Van Winkle

I FEEL AWKWARD USING THE word "disaster" in this time and context. Like many millions of other people, I followed the news of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath with sadness and shock that mounted by the hour for days on end. Those events affected me in a way that was both profound and unexpected. There is a time to talk about business and a time to be human, and I run the risk of trivializing the people and events tied to Katrina by mixing those two elements here. For those who lost friends or family, had their entire worldly history swept away, or faced any of the other countless casualties associated with Katrina, the last thing that I expect is on their minds is computer data. Of course, this holds true for any disaster, whether it affects millions or only one person. Tragedy is not bound by scale.

And yet we have to remember that hundreds of thousands did evacuate in front of Katrina and Rita and no doubt there will be millions more who flee before such dangers in the future. Some of these people do and will find themselves thankful for their lives and health but in the precarious position of trying to put their livelihoods back in order before losing more than they already have. They need their businesses back up and running immediately.

You've read countless articles in RAM and elsewhere about the need to back up data, and normally we talk about things like viruses, human error, sabotage, and hard drive failures as being the primary causes for concern. And statistically they are. But I for one have had to do a lot of soul searching recently. Not until last week did I bother to start Googling and learn the ramifications of my family living in the Cascadia fault zone, which is due for its regular 9.0 earthquake any time within the next 200 years. And here I thought the Northwest was the country's safe haven.

The point is that, with disasters, sometimes you have enough warning to run. Sometimes there's no time. When a 9.0 quake hits, all you can do is duck and pray. If you make it, then you run for the clear to dodge the aftershocks and collapsing structures. And, as we saw in the extreme tragedy of New Orleans, the anarchy that can follow disasters poses its own risks to property and resources. We all hope we never have to run from disaster. But we should stand ready in case the need arises.

"Over the years, people always ask, if you only had two or three minutes to get out of your house in an emergency, what would you grab?" says Randy Barber, president of CRU-DataPort. "Answers change over time, but these days I think a lot of people would want to grab their computer. Of course, trying to carry a computer out of the house in an emergency is a little more challenging than just grabbing the drive."

CRU-DataPort makes removable drive enclosures. You install a frame into the PC. The frame wires down to the drive controller, often located on the motherboard. You then mount a hard drive into a carrier that slides into the frame. The lock on the front of the carrier that secures it into the frame also doubles as the power switch. In an emergency situation, all it takes is turning the key and pulling out the carrier—a two-second operation. The U.S. government has used DataPorts for over eight years now, and the company's enclosures are a favorite of embassies and military installations, particularly forward posts that might have to be abandoned at a moment's notice.

"We see over and over that people and business users don’t back up their data," says Stacey Lund, video president of marketing for Maxtor's Branded Products Group. "Why? Because they say it’s too hard, too technical, too much trouble."

The DataPort V is CRU's chief internal enclosure. Available in SATA, PATA, and SCSI varieties, the unit is built like a tank from cast aluminum and is rated for 25,000 carrier insertions. Personally, if I were going this far, I'd pay a few more bucks for the V plus ($60 to $65 street for the whole assembly), which features encryption. "If you do plan to store something off-site and you have HIPAA or Sorbanes Oxley-type requirements," says Barber, "we would argue that you want to do that with an encrypted DataPort. The encryption is all done inside the carrier. Once you transfer the data onto the drive, it's encrypted—everything, including the file allocation table. You send that off-site for backup or store it out of necessity in an emergency and you can be guaranteed that no one's even looking at the FAT to figure out what might be on the drive."

CRU understands that many consumers and small businesses might balk at adding $65 to the cost of an internal drive, so it recently came out with the DataPort 3, which trades out cast aluminum for heavy duty plastic, although the frame-carrier connector is still the same. The DataPort 3 complete assembly has a street price of only $15 to $20, and additional frames for swapping out additional drives with archival material or alternate configurations only cost an extra $6 to $11. This is a minuscule value-add to put on a system in terms of price, and I'm honestly shocked that more people don't make use of it. We all buy disposable surge protectors and UPSes that would probably crumble at the first sign of a real voltage spike, but almost no one takes the forethought to make their internal drives quickly transportable, never mind all of the very cost-effective near-line storage potential inherent in a DataPort configuration.

"In many situations, I think it's better to grab your drive than just a backup of the drive," says Barber. "It would be the most current, most up to date. But also, for those who make a practice out of pulling their drive out every night and keeping it locked up somewhere safe, they eliminate the danger of someone using that drive in an unwanted way as well as minimizing the possibility of theft. Adding that drive back into a new system is a fairly easy process. Tape backups? Not as easy."

Of course, not everyone will agree. A removable internal drive solution still has the price tag stigma carried over from SCSI-based servers, and while you can install frames into any number of systems, you can still only run framed drives in carrier-equipped chasses. (That is, unless you use the USB/1394-based DataPort HotDock enclosure at $100 to $115 street.) To overcome such barriers, you want a more universal external hard drive.

I haven't seen Maxtor print this anywhere, but I know from inside sources that Maxtor has sent out piles of OneTouch drive AC adapters at no charge to those who grabbed their drives but no other equipment to flee from Hurricane Katrina.

Having a USB 2.0- or FireWire-based hard drive is almost a must. Since we're talking about disaster preparation, I would encourage you to think even more about the interface. For customers who are super-diligent about backing up their network nodes, a small NAS box is fine, including the Western Digital NetCenter and Maxtor's Shared Storage Drive. However, most NAS devices (including these two) use 10/100 interfaces, which are tortuously slow when you're in a hurry. When minutes count and a user has to back up whole folders or drives before hitting the road, FireWire is a little better than USB 2.0, and 1394b is almost twice as fast as 1394a. The best drive for fast, single-system backup is doubtless the Maxtor OneTouch II FireWire 800.

We've reviewed the OneTouch II in RAM before, so I won't go into great depth here. Suffice it to say that the drive's tough aluminum enclosure makes for safer traveling in chaotic conditions, and the bundled Retrospect software automates the everyday backup process within seconds of installation. The single button on the front panel can be used to initiate backup sessions, but the real idea is to remove the element of human forgetfulness altogether.

"We see over and over that people and business users don't back up their data," says Stacey Lund, video president of marketing for Maxtor's Branded Products Group. "Why? Because they say it's too hard, too technical, too much trouble. That's what inspired our OneTouch design in the first place and why everyone else then tried to copy us. If a customer doesn't find your backup solution practical, he's not going to use it."

A lot of resellers and end-users try to pinch pennies when it comes to external drives. You can shave $50 to $100 off the price of a pre-built external drive from the likes of Maxtor, Seagate, or WD by buying a cheap enclosure and plugging in a bare internal drive off your stock shelf. But you sacrifice component quality, durability, and the must-have software. A solid software implementation should not be underestimated.

"Everybody talks about how easy it is to back up a system," says Lund. "That's only half the battle. It's one thing to get out before a disaster hits, but once the dust settles, you need to put your life and business back together, and the quicker that gets done, the better off you'll be. This is why easy, dependable restoration procedures are necessary."

The number one factor to have in a disaster preparation and recovery solution, though, is the support of a leading company. I haven't seen Maxtor print this anywhere, but I know from inside sources that Maxtor has sent out piles of OneTouch drive AC adapters at no charge to those who grabbed their drives but no other equipment to flee from Hurricane Katrina. To the best of my knowledge, Maxtor has received no praise or public thanks for this effort, but I think they've certainly earned the recognition here. This type of support is what you would hope for as part of the value-add you offer to customers in your branded peripherals and accessories.

I also had a very interesting talk with Steve Hammond, senior vice president, sales and marketing for Data Protection Solutions. He made me aware that I'd become so caught up in discussing backup-specific products that I'd ignored the obvious. Laptop sales are now drawing even with or exceeding desktop sales in some segments. Practically anybody who travels has one, and, like desktops, virtually all notebooks now have integrated LAN connections. Why not invest in a sizable notebook hard drive and back up to the notebook?

Perhaps everyone reading this knows about folder synchronization in Windows XP over a network. But just in case, be aware that Windows lets you open up sharing of a volume, folder, or file on one system, then let any other system on the LAN use My Network Places to select that data for "offline synchronization." So say I have two folders on my main tower system called Writing and Family Photos, and I want to keep synchronized copies of these on my notebook. I share those two folders on my tower, then use My Network Places on my notebook to select both folders. I select the Make Available Offline option from the pull-down and check the "automatically synchronize" box. This way, when I'm on the road and make changes to writing files or add photos, those are automatically synched back to the tower the next time I'm on my LAN. As Hammond pointed out to me, you can also use this feature to maintain current backup drive images on your laptop. The beauty is that this is a zero cost affair. You can provide the configuration as a value-add with your whitebooks or charge for the setup time. Either way, many users might feel good knowing that if they have time to only grab one device, their notebooks will not only contain their critical data but also let them stay productive wherever they land.

Maxtor's Stacey Lund also pointed out that not only is external disk storage considerably less expensive than online storage over time, but owners of external drives don’t feel they need to worry as much about security.

Yet notebook drives will only get you so far in terms of capacity. You might only have 20GB or 30GB for backup space, which pushes us back to external drives. My leading beef with such drives is that most of them require reinstallation of Windows and restoration software in order to work, which means an hour of software loading before you can get to work. Data Protection Solutions's internal EzBACKUP solution ($599) is probably the ultimate in desktop-level bare metal backup. (Bare metal means you back up everything, including the OS and anything else needed to run from just a power-up state, alleviating the need for restore discs and reinstalls.) Like a DataPort product, the EzBACKUP uses hot swappable drive frames, but you're still facing a substantial purchase price.

A better option for consumer and SOHO clients might be the EzBACKUP sa (for stand-alone), a USB 2.0 single-drive enclosure that uses special bundled software to make a high-speed, bare metal backup of another source drive.

"Disaster recovery starts with protection, and that's much like security," says Hammond. "The false sense of security you get in data protection is, ‘Well, I have restore points in Windows' or ‘I'm connected to the network, and that'll back it up.' The first thing is to have a strategy for how data is being protected locally and then from there to the back IT closet if there is one. Then you need a strategy for getting that data off-site safely in a portable fashion. Beyond that, it comes down to whether you want off-site archiving for compliance issues: HIPAA, Sarbanes Oxley, etc. Is that needed? Do you need deep archiving, such as tape? You need to go through all these layers as part of a strategy. Without a strategy, all you're left with is forensics."

To illustrate the point, Hammond points to companies that rely on Web-based backup storage services.

"The industry is full of online data backup companies. I don't want to dismiss that, but it does not solve individual desktop problems. People don't want performance hits or latency while they're working, so it pushes you to a backup window in the evening, and if I have multiple systems going to that, the challenge becomes internal compliance on the network, because a lot of people take their notebooks home at night. So people still aren't backing up, even at very large companies. I was in the Florida office at one of the top ten law firms in the world the day after Hurricane Katrina went through, and the IT manager admitted to me that 70% to 80% of the intellectual properties on their desktops was not backed up, meaning he has a serious compliance issue."

Maxtor's Stacey Lund also pointed out that not only is external disk storage considerably less expensive than online storage over time, but owners of external drives don't feel they need to worry as much about security. After all, with news stories trumpeting that the biggest credit companies in the world are getting their systems hacked, who can you trust for sure online?

Again, I don't want to trivialize the plight of disaster victims. I don't want to urge anyone to go out and push disaster preparation as a way to sell products in coordination with real disaster headlines. That's tacky and dishonorable. At the same time, though, this summer's tragedies highlight the risks we all face in the background of each day. I suspect we all can find tasteful ways to stress the importance of disaster preparation to customers without resorting to "Don't let Hurricane Katrina happen to YOU!" Disaster preparation is sorely needed among computer users at all levels, and a smart implementation can seriously change someone's life for the better when they need help the most. My sincere hope is that the channel can leverage its expertise and customer touch to help make such solutions more prevalent.