By Infrascale Guest Blog 1

Having been in the data protection industry for a while (almost 10 years, to be exact), here at Infrascale we’ve had the opportunity to watch the comings and goings of other backup vendors and their promotions. We’ve recently noticed a trend of many backup appliance companies offering “unlimited storage,” “unlimited cloud” and a “no limit cloud.” These companies suggest that you can buy an appliance with a certain amount of storage–10TB, for example–and get an unlimited amount of cloud storage included for a fixed price.

This seems like an enticing offer, even to us, and we’re a cloud backup vendor. So, naturally, we took out our cloud microscopes and looked into the fine print.

Backup History

To begin, it pays to understand a little about the heritage of backup appliances. Backup appliances have been around longer than the term “the cloud.” A backup appliance is installed on-site to protect data from a number of servers and endpoints. But, if that site is affected by a natural disaster, the backup appliance is destroyed along with everything else. So, the idea came about to replicate that backup data to a second appliance located off-site. This way, if the primary site gets hit by a hurricane, the off-site appliance can be utilized to recover the data. Basically, you want to copy, or replicate, the backup on-site to the off-site appliance.

When the cloud came about, backup appliance vendors wanted to jump on the bandwagon, and so they made it possible to replicate the backup data not only to a second physical appliance, but also to a second “virtual” appliance that runs in a cloud. This works fine. If the primary appliance goes down, for example, data can still be recovered from the second appliance running in the cloud. However, the one-for-one replication scheme still exists. Everything on the appliance is replicated to the cloud. Everything deleted from the backup appliance is also deleted from the cloud. 

Unlimited in Name Only

So, there’s nothing “unlimited” about their clouds at all. The cloud is capped by the size of the appliance you buy. Buy a 2TB appliance, get 2TB of cloud–no more. It will feel unlimited to you because you’ll never hit the limit of your cloud storage until you hit the storage limit of the appliance. At that point, you’ll have to decide whether you want to archive data off the appliance or buy a bigger appliance. If you decide to archive the data to make room for new data, it is removed from the cloud, as well. If you buy a bigger appliance, then you get more cloud, up to the size of that new appliance. But, at no point is your cloud capacity decoupled from the capacity of the backup appliance. No matter how you look at it, “unlimited cloud” really means “unlimited cloud up to the capacity of your backup appliance.”

Ultimately, my advice here is that it’s important to take a close look at backup appliance companies offering “unlimited cloud” storage. There’s usually more to the story than you think once you dig in.

Ken Shaw is the founder and CEO of Infrascale. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.