How do you backup remote offices easily?

Meet the "airplane black box" for remote office, back office (ROBO) data protection. The ioSafe solution is designed to provide a fireproof, waterproof and impervious but simple solution to implement and use.

 

David Littman:                    Hi Dave Littman, Truth in IT, joined by Robb Moore. Robb is CEO of ioSafe. Robb, welcome.

Robb Moore:                        Thank you, thanks for having me.

David Littman:                    All right. This is a very cool alternative to all the buzz around internet backup for ROBOs, remote offices and branch offices. IoSafe does it in a completely different way. It's 180 degrees from what I think everybody is talking about; but it's very cool, and a lot of really interesting applications.

                                                      Robb, tell us a little bit about ioSafe, and what makes you guys unique.

Robb Moore:                        Sure. At ioSafe we make fireproof, waterproof data storage. It's a bit like an aircraft black box, but for data. We make USB devices, NAS devices, and we also make servers. The idea behind that is you can have instant disaster protection. Just to the millisecond the data is created, it's instantly protected. There is no lag between the time it's created and the time it's protected, if, of course, you've set it up correctly.

                                                      Then also, the advantage for our hardware is speed of recovery. If you need 10 terabytes, 20 terabytes, 100 terabytes back on site, as soon as possible to get an office up and running; ioSafe is about being able to get that data back, just as soon as you can touch the hard drives. You can put those in a recovery array, and recover the full data volume.

David Littman:                    Yeah. It's like the flight data recorder, right, in an airplane?

Robb Moore:                        It's kind of. It's kind of, but much bigger.

David Littman:                    Yeah.

Robb Moore:                        Not as expensive.

David Littman:                    You know, it's designed for a location where there is data, but the connectivity isn't maybe always what you need. Maybe the personnel is occupied with doing other things, besides really paying attention to backup. It's designed, I think, to be the storage that people use online, as in a NAS. It's really a very simple architecture as well.

Robb Moore:                        Yeah. It integrates with any computer system. Our simplest versions are just a USB hard drive. If you can plug in a USB thumb drive, you could use ioSafe and you could have terabytes of fireproof, waterproof backup. A lot of people say, "Well, why do I need that? Why don't I just pump it all online, and be done with it?" Well, data storage can be complicated. I think that there's a lot of different levels of data protection and data storage. For instance, I use a Mac computer. I backup my Mac computer with Time Machine.

                                                      I'm not necessarily interested in trying to pump my entire programs, operating systems, my entire computer online all the time; but I do back it up to an ioSafe. If there's ever an emergency, or if we have a natural disaster, or I just have a hard drive crash; it's really easy to get my whole computer back quickly. I can get it restored and back in business the same day, which is really tough to do online, trying to pull back a terabyte or so across the internet. It takes a while. There's always this joke of it's faster to walk a hard drive across California than to try and stream it across California. I think there's a lot of truth in that when you're trying to recover.

David Littman:                    Yeah, it's interesting. You know, a lot of backup is built on the concept of having a copy of the data locally, and a copy of the data offsite. That's obviously done in case of physical disaster to location number one. What you're saying is basically this system is basically impervious to physical disaster at site number one?

Robb Moore:                        Yeah. Well, it's designed to withstand any kind of typical disaster. Obvious disasters would be a fire, a normal building fire, or a flood, or a basement flood. It's made to withstand firefighter hoses. Especially the small business, your small to medium enterprise, I think people struggle with disaster recovery. They struggle with recovery time objectives, and recovery point objectives; and they don't really have superstar DR consultants working on staff. This is something that's super simple, gives you up to the second, disaster protection.

                                                      Well, there's two ways to achieve instant disaster protection for data just created. One, is to have twin synchronous data centers, always in sink, geographically separated; and no matter what you do, if data center number one goes down, you've got data center number two. I think, typically, that's kind of hard for a lot of small businesses to run like that and to have that kind of sophistication. So how do you get instant disaster protection? I think ioSafe is a valid way to achieve that, in a way that nobody else is really doing it. That makes ioSafe unique that way, and super economical for a small business or small to medium enterprise. Or like you said, the ROBO application, where you have the remote office/branch office, and being able to protect data.

David Littman:                    Well, it's an interesting story, and you guys certainly have some great logos for customers, some very high profile customers.

Robb Moore:                        Yeah, we do. A lot of enterprise customers use our products for that remote office/branch office; not necessarily in the data center. I like to think of ioSafe as protecting all the rest of the world's data, not just in the data center, right. Data center data represents about 20-30% of data in general; so I would argue that the vast majority of data sitting outside the data center, it's sitting in little pockets everywhere. IoSafe is about protecting that data where it sits, and not exposing it online, and just having a super economical option to get a level of DR that would be really difficult to do.

David Littman:                    All right, fabulous, fabulous. Well, it's kind of like bringing data center protection down, way out to the edge, and to the-

Robb Moore:                        Locally.

David Littman:                    -little guys out there that don't have the sophistication of the data centers.

Robb Moore:                        Exactly.

David Littman:                    Robb Moore, CEO with ioSafe, thanks very much for taking the time to speak with us.

Robb Moore:                        Thanks. Appreciate it, David.

David Littman:                    Okay. And hey, thanks for watching. Check out our other videos, truthinit.com. Thanks again.