Posts tagged with “molo”…

Moving your backup data to an remote data-storage provider is a great way to lower cost and remove complexity from your organisation. Inhouse backup is still appropriate, but not at the level it might otherwise be, and it's nice to have a partner take on your requirements around security, scalability, and accessibility.

This service is often provided by molocated (managed, colocated) hosting providers with tier 1 network infrastructure. Providers like Control Circle have enterprise kit, NetApp filers and the like with eSATA disks.

Over the years, and most credibly, over the last 18 months (how many of this list from 2001 are still running?), a series of web-based data storage providers have emerged to serve the SME. These include Humyo, Xdrive, MyDisk, i2drive, DriveHQ and SkyDrive amongst many others.

At a glance, Humyo provides the closest level of desktop integration, with shell integration and a filesystem driver to provide storage access through a virtual drive in Windows, and a trial. Not all is well, however. After migrating a number of files from our backup by way of trial, the service ran for a week before the desktop client started to problems logging in to their server. The trial account works for 14 days, so we thought getting back the files back would be trivial. It wasn't.

After sending a message to the support email address (there's no phone number listed on the site) we got an email back the next day, and we were able to get back into the virtual disk. The virtual disk showed the files that had been copied in, but when we tried to copy them out again, back to a local disk, it raised an error along the lines of "cannot copy file -- the file is not there".

Following further back and forth over the same day with the support team, they requested we sent over the OfflineJournal.bin journal file for their diagnostics. But we've not heard anything back for nearly a month, despite chasing them three times. As far as we're aware, the data that they held on our behalf was lost (of course, we had our own backup), and who knows how securely it was held?

Watch out for Humyo. They might lose your data, and our experience is that the support is very poor.

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I found myself on trip to the VSNL data-centre in Stratford today, to inspect a fairly small roll-out of equipment and to oversee installation more. It's a data-centre I've visited before, when searching for a suitable home for a number of racks for another client.

There's always something that stands out on a trip to a data-centre, and this time it was the racks and racks of PS3s and XBox 360s in one of the corners. Like some data-centres I've seen, with stacks of 1U servers each with a mini-USB connector running around the front to clamped on Nokia phone, there must be a better way do this!

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