If you picked up this month’s issue of Storage magazine, you likely noticed the article by Jacob Gsoedl titled, “Blueprint for cloud-based disaster recovery” (page 21). You also might have noticed my quote in the piece, which detailed different options for disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud (page 27).

Gsoedl notes that there are lots of different ways to do DR in the cloud. He ably discusses the pros and cons of managed applications and managed DR, back up to and restore from the cloud, replication to virtual machines in the cloud and back up to and restore to the cloud.

For that final option, I told Gsoedl that, “several cloud service providers use our products for secure deduped replication and to bring servers up virtually in the cloud.” I’d love to expand on that statement, if I may.

As the article explains, these recommendations all offer attractive elements for companies, depending on their needs, resources and recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) requirements. What it didn’t get to, however, is that the huge opportunity in cloud-based DR, regardless of the specific method employed, is to change the back up paradigm itself.

The cloud expands the opportunity to stop talking about just protecting specific files or data blocks and start talking about service-oriented data protection (SODP). This is what matters to enterprises, of course. Beyond protecting bits and bytes, the cloud needs to help organizations deliver better service to users.

That’s what FalconStor data protection is about. Our tools deliver cloud-based backup and DR designed with SODP in mind, and any blueprint for cloud-based disaster recovery must have service embedded in its foundation.

Last year was a significant one for virtualized servers in the government-agency data center. Many such organizations took advantage of the opportunity to make better use of existing budgets by consolidating physical infrastructure and commoditizing server hardware.

What many of those agencies have yet to act on, though, is the other half of the story.

In 2010, these organizations will move to address the data aspects of information technology and the value of storage virtualization.There are real economic savings to be had here for any IT team that recognizes its job did not end with server virtualization. I actually wrote an article in Government Computer News that appeared this month on this very subject:"Why 2010 is the year of the virtual data center."

Storage virtualization is accomplished by creating a virtual abstraction layer between physical or virtual servers and the existing physical storage. Once the storage is virtualized and the physical location of data becomes abstracted from the hosts, some interesting opportunities for savings become apparent:

Tape backup is still the most prevalent technology in place for dealing with data protection, and array based replication is still the most common method of protection for mission critical applications, but companies are really starting to like the idea of saving money by innovating in how they attack the largest ongoing IT costs, which is still backup and disaster recovery.

Those of you who were around in the storage industry back in the late 90's probably remember the amazing rise and fall of storage as a service, or SaaS. There was real buzz in the industry back then around outsourcing storage resources to third parties, and how it would enable companies to focus on their core business rather than IT.