Lane: Thanks for dropping by our site.

On S3…
We don’t offer the ‘backup to S3′ facility yet – at least not for production environments. We do have an internal Beta of this wherein we’re running a backup server on Amazon EC2 and back-end storage at S3. This will be available as a public beta later this quarter.

For production environments – as a first step, we will be supporting a ‘replicate to S3′ feature whereby service providers can replicate their backup server(s) to S3. Thereafter, later this year, we will roll out the ability to run your backup server on EC2 (and other cloud computing platforms) and storage on S3 (and other cloud storage)

We don’t offer storage/ backup services ourselves; we only focus on the software. Each of our 900+ partners hosts and manages their customers’ data themselves – on a server(s) that they host/manage themselves – typically at a co-lo facility.

With the Amazon initiatives, besides offering choice to these partners, we will also be able to ‘speak to’ the many service providers who may prefer not to host their customers’ data themselves.

On typical deployments…
The typical deployment is one wherein laptops, desktops & servers (each of which is running an agent) backs up to the backup server.

Another common approach is for client machines to backup to local servers (so they can backup/restore a lot faster); the servers, in turn, replicate (on schedule) to a replication server managed by the service provider.

Many service providers employ both approaches. With the latter (local backup + replication), they, in effect, achieve what many backup appliances do – only they can do so with (say) StoreGrid running on a simple Linux machine – as a local backup server.

Lane, I’d be happy to run you through all this in more detail over a call/demo or perhaps at CompTIA Breakaway (booth 222), if you’re planning on being there. I can be reached at lux AT vembu DOT com

Regards
Lux

Lakshmanan Narayan
President
Vembu Technologies