Getting into the panel discussions, which seemed, in my perusal of the agenda, to be the real meat of the session schedule at the event, Tuesday morning continued with a discussion on the changing face of disaster recovery, featuring Rob McClary of Fortrust, Phil Collerton of Interxion, John Lindeman of SunGard and Howard Peace of Verizon Business.
Is disaster recovery dead? Golding started with a pretty simple question, but with a bit of complexity underneath. The consensus answer, however, seemed to be that, no, DR is not dead. But it is changing, technologically and philosophically.
He asked if DR was the killer app for cloud, which got at the notion that technologies like virtualization are changing the nature of what an offsite backup has to involve, infrastructure wise.
Well, a panel is pretty difficult to cover completely, so I’m going to try to focus on touching on some of the most interesting points of conversation.
One such point was the idea that sometimes when there’s an issue of downtime on some kind of public-facing service that could have (and often should have) had some kind of disaster recovery service in place, but didn’t, the service operator often tries to place the blame on the managed host. The question had to do with whether there’s something hosts (or DR providers) can do to make the customer understand that they need that kind of service, or do they need to be build into the hosting solutions.
There wasn’t really a consensus on this, aside from the fact that there isn’t really an answer. But the panelists seemed to agree, generally, that providers need to work with customers to create a solution to mitigate the possibility for disaster type situations.
Another interesting point: virtualization is a big part of what’s changing about the physical infrastructure involved in DR, which enables the DR provider to use shared resources to serve multiple companies. This is driving down the price of DR solutions. This is something that customers are actually willing to accept (shared resources), considering the price point and the advancing security around those kinds of solutions.
Good question: is there a time in the future when software developers will all know how to build their applications the way Google builds its search, for instance, in the sense that you (as a user) don’t know when a node goes down, because the rest of the resources supporting the application pick up the slack?
The answer involved the fact that DR providers can play a role in showing developers how to do this. Part of this answer is a distinction between being a vendor and being a business partner. For some of these more explicitly DR-focused companies (like SunGard), having a well-developed professional services organization is a very important consideration.
In a discussion of how geographic differences impact the disaster recovery business, the subject of “server hugging” came up – the notion that some customers just feel the need to be able to physically access whatever equipment they’re collocating. Golding says this has been a subject for years in the outsourcing discussion, with the assumption always being that eventually this will go away. The panelists seemed to agree that it’s going away, but very slowly. In some ways, this tendency is a boon to certain kinds of colocation companies, particularly those with a certain geographic area of specialization.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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