[OpenAFS] Commercial AFS backups
Kristen J. Webb
kwebb@teradactyl.com
Mon, 09 Oct 2006 10:56:21 -0600
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Teradactyl generally avoids chiming in on subjects such as these but since we
were named specifically on this thread it seems justified to comment. It’s
true, Teradactyl is a small company with a customer base that is virtually all
large government and educational entities. We fully support the OpenAFS
community. We also need to pay our staff. Therefore, the True incremental
Backup System (TiBS) software does cost money.
A recent post by skvidal@linux.duke.edu states “Teradactyl worries the hell out
of me. They're a small company with about 12 customers from what I can tell AND
their closed source. So if they go away so does my ability to deal with my
backups. Not a good combination. At least with TSM you had only to worry about
IBM changing their mind on you - but not outright vanishing as a result of a few
bad trades.” Teradactyl is a small company. We don’t advertise all of our
customers because many have privacy policies and we respect them. We are closed
source just like TSM. We have not changed our mind and dropped support for AFS.
Conversely, we have been improving the product for OpenAFS and are working on
significant solutions for large scale OpenAFS cells. Most importantly, we have
paid for all of our growth organically and don’t have any external shareholders
or public debt to pull us away from what the “market” feels is not a profitable
platform to support.
TiBS doesn’t require a license key for restores to ensure that our customers
have access to their data at all times. Multiple restore servers can be setup
without charge for massive parallel restores in the event of catastrophic
failure. We only license the backup function and our model is built on
processing power to scale with your needs.
The real issue at this AFS site and others is that they need to pay for our
software. Presumably this site purchased TSM and/or paid large maintenance fees
to support the application but now the same site seems unwilling to buy a
solution from a company that actively maintains support for OpenAFS and strongly
invests precious resources in the OpenAFS community. It stuns us, as owners of
Teradactyl, that entities will devote considerable amounts of University and
Government resources, in the form of salaries and associated computing assets,
to find a way to produce a solution which lacks scale and many of the benefits
our patent brings to the community to solve the problems associated with OpenAFS
backups. We have built this company with our own money, time, and a great deal
of effort. We don’t have shareholders pushing us away from AFS because it lacks
the revenue required to meet break even points that the larger corporations have
with their size and structure. If you want commercial support of OpenAFS AND
you want quality customer service, then it will cost some money. When you try
and talk a private company into basically giving their software away to you
because of your name and then publicly criticize them when they refuse, you will
find little commercial interest.
Perhaps, backing a small firm that uses its money to grow and improve would
produce better results than trying to reinvent the wheel or publicly attack
them. The more OpenAFS sites that become our client the more time we can spend
in pushing advancements in synthetic consolidation for OpenAFS and backups on
other platforms. With a 100% customer retention rate, approaching 8 years in
business, and more than 11 years of work on our technology, we have demonstrated
a solid, viable, and on-going solution. We even take some of that hard earned
money and put it back into the OpenAFS community. Some solutions are freely
available for smaller sites and we do not try to compete in this space.
Teradactyl is focused on the larger OpenAFS cells that need advancements in
synthetic consolidation to scale their cells while maintaining a viable backup
and disaster recovery solution. We simply ask you to avoid tarnishing our name
when you lack the facts about us and our technology. Not very cool dude.
Kristen Webb & John Riley III
Partners – Teradactyl LLC.
seth vidal wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-10-08 at 19:00 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> seth vidal <skvidal@linux.duke.edu> writes:
>>
>>> I'd like to hear what internal mechanisms people are doing to backup
>>> afs. It seems like everyone has their own special system to backup afs.
>>> I'm curious about why that's so and why none of the major open source
>>> backup software has support for afs.
>> I thought Amanda did have some support, and there have certainly been
>> discussions of adding support to Bacula. However, I think that the Amanda
>> support wasn't beyond the dump level.
>
> I'm currently working on amanda's support. It's not what I would call
> the most graceful solution and it's not built in - you have to graft a
> bunch of pieces on to make it work.
>
>
>
>>> When I looked at the ones available (both open source and closed) I was
>>> woefully unimpressed. Many of them seemed fragile or problem-prone.
>>> Specifically I'm interested in how many of them can do:
>>> - volumeset backups or backup by wildcarded volume/partion names
>>> - full volume restores
>>> - directory restores preserving acls
>>> - individual file restores
>>> - incremental backups
>>> - backups spanning tapes
>>> - 100+GB volume backups and restores
>> Yeah, I think Teradactyl might do that for you and that's about it. TSM
>> used to, but they dropped AFS file backup support.
>
> Teradactyl worries the hell out of me. They're a small company with
> about 12 customers from what I can tell AND their closed source. So if
> they go away so does my ability to deal with my backups. Not a good
> combination. At least with TSM you had only to worry about IBM changing
> their mind on you - but not outright vanishing as a result of a few bad
> trades.
>
> So the features I want in a backup system is:
> - open source
> - capable of dealing with afs (acls included) in a way that doesn't
> make me feel like I'm using bailing wire and duct tape to backup my
> mission-critical data.
>
> -sv
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OpenAFS-info mailing list
> OpenAFS-info@openafs.org
> https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
>
>
--
Mr. Kristen J. Webb
Teradactyl LLC.
PHONE: 1-505-242-1091
EMAIL: kwebb@teradactyl.com
VISIT: http://www.teradactyl.com
Home of the
True incremental Backup System
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