Review of the 3X Remote Backup Appliance

The headline of the pitch I received back in November read “3X Systems Launches Private Backup Cloud Appliance for SMBs”. The notion of a “private cloud” intrigued me, so I decided to follow up. (Besides, no one quoted in the press release used the word “excited,” so they get extra points.)

We all talk about “the cloud” as if it’s some amorphous collective up in the sky somewhere, but none of these “cloud computing” services actually operates among the cumulus and cumulonimbus. Your data is not floating around among the raindrops or waiting to crystallize as snowflakes. All it means to use cloud services is that instead of installing the software on servers in your office building, it’s on servers in someone else’s data center, and you access it through the Internet. Cloud storage puts your data onto disks in a similar data center (or more than one, for redundancy), instead of on a backup drive in your office.

With most cloud services, you rent rather than owning—though with companies like Google making so much available for free, consumers may forget that there are costs involved, the same way they seem to forget that there’s actual hardware involved.

With the 3X Remote Backup Appliance, you become your own online backup service.

Now, if you were geeky enough, you could find a way to do this without a special device. Personally, I’m not geeky enough. And I’m pretty geeky, relative to most people I know. So I think the 3X RBA is a great idea for three reasons.

1. The biggest disadvantage of online backup is the slow speed of data transfer over the Internet. Because the 3X makes its initial full (or “seed”) backup over the local network, it’s much faster than typical online backup services. (How long did it take me to upload my 2 GB backup to MozyHome Free the first time? 12 hours? And that over a cable connection.)
2. Many businesses—and even individuals—want to be sure of just who has access to their proprietary or confidential data. Running your own online backup service, with only your own company’s data on it, gives you complete control.
3. If you have half a dozen or more computers to back up, the monthly or yearly cost of most online backup services is going to start to add up pretty quickly. Many of them charge per computer rather than by the amount of data backed up.

So I arranged to get a product demo and an interview with 3X CEO Alan Arman and some of the team, and also to get an evaluation unit to check out. The demo was very straightforward: it certainly looked easy enough to use. But things are often a bit different in real-life situations. I wanted to see whether the 3X would really be as easy to set up and operate as it seemed to be. (After all, the CloudPlug was harder than it appeared.)

The evaluation unit arrived on January 20^th—the same day as my mother’s SaveMe drive. I was surprised at the size of the box. Based on the photos I’d seen, I was expecting something more the size of my Buffalo Quattro. This box was square and flat.

When I got home, I found out why. The 3X comes in two form factors: the cube, for desktop use, and the 1U rackmount model. Guess which was in that box.

“They sent you a what?” the Ur-Guru said. “Didn’t you go batty from the 40×40mm fans in a rack model!?”

To be fair, Richard Keggans at 3X offered to ship me a cube version instead when I told him about the mistake, but once he assured me that I could still use the rackmount model without a rack, it didn’t seem worth replacing it when I was only going to be using it for a few hours anyway. (The PR spokesperson, who has perhaps never been in a server room, said “We didn’t think it would make a difference to you.” Ha. I think he just wanted to be sure they’d get their $2500 device back.)

Anyway, for anyone else who’s never been in a server room—it’s not so much that the fan noise is loud. It’s not actually louder than, say, my space heater, which is also an electric fan. I did not really need to warn the neighbors to run for their earplugs before powering the thing up.

It’s just that there’s something about the quality of the noise that causes instant brain death. You can tell immediately why people lock these things in cages behind heavy doors inside secure buildings miles away from where they do their actual work. Even the Ur-Guru doesn’t work with rack-mounted systems, because the noise would be too much even for him if he had them in his home office.

So if I were a real customer, I would have bought the cube model, which Richard says is “almost silent.” And it probably is, too, because it isn’t being stored less than an inch from some equally hot device above and below it. The Buffalo Quattro, which has more hardware (though less software) in it, makes very little noise. (Interestingly, the two draw the same amount of power.)

Installation

Even given the awkwardness of having the wrong version of the device, it was easy to set up the 3X. (The printout of the Quick Start Guide was helpful, too.) Plug in the power cable, connect the Ethernet cable to your router, and turn the monster on. Then insert the memory stick with the 3X admin software into your computer and let it run. Then reboot your computer, and start up the 3X Systems Admin tool again. Your device should automatically appear; just select it and choose “Launch Manager.”

That takes you to the web interface, where you do all the sophisticated stuff, including downloading the client software so you can back up individual computers to the device.

The critical thing at this juncture is to set up port forwarding—something I don’t think I’ve talked about since I reviewed ION Backup. I obviously hadn’t done anything with it since then, because I still had that port set up to forward. (Oops.) It took me a while to find the right screen in my router admin, but eventually I found what I needed, and it only took a minute to set it up after that.

There’s a connectivity check feature in the web manager tool for the 3X, so you can check to make sure that it’s possible to reach your device from outside your local network. This is important if you’re going to actually use it for its intended purpose as an online backup device. (And if you aren’t, why are you paying so much money?)

I then downloaded the client and set it up on my netbook. This worked pretty much the same as installing any other backup software. Once it’s installed, however, you have to get a key from the administrator (provided in the backup manager, above) and then the administrator has to approve you. The administrator can also create backup sets and set quotas for client computers.

I’d read some of the instructions for creating backup sets while waiting for Enna to reboot after the initial 3X admin tools install, so I figured I was all set to define my backup set and go. I did run into one small issue, however: when I clicked “Edit” under the “Backup Sets” tab, the top of the window ran off my 1024 x 600 netbook screen.

I was still able to create a backup set that would copy everything on the C:\ drive except for the Recycler, System Volume Information, Windows folder, and Program Files. When I eliminated those, I was left with 9 GB of data, and the 3X copied them quickly (if loudly) while I had lunch.

I’m not really in a position to test the deduplication and some of the other features of the 3X, but deduplication is the reason you can back up several computers to a 100 GB drive. All enterprise systems rely on it these days, but almost no SOHO systems offer this level of dedupe. (And if you have people sending e-mail attachments to others in your company, you’re racking up duplicate files fast, never mind duplicate software installations.)

So I’ll leave those to another reviewer and just say that my “seed” backup went smoothly. It was time to test the remote backup.

Remote Backup and Restore

The normal way to use a 3X is to disconnect it from the local network when the seed backups are complete and move it to another location—the business owner’s home, a different office, or even a cage rented in a data center. Then you plug it in and hook it up to the Internet, and the client computers will back up incrementally according to their schedules. Because only the changes are backed up, this doesn’t take much bandwidth or time.

I don’t have an alternate office location, much less a pocket data center, so I took my computer elsewhere instead. I headed over to the local public library to see whether I could back up and restore data using their free wi-fi connection.

I didn’t have so much luck backing up. I’m not sure why, but the program just seemed to sit around endlessly calculating the size of the backup. (Not very large: I had downloaded a whole two image files so there would actually be some changes to back up.) This might have had something to do with the very slow wi-fi connection, or it might just be that the backup client has to scan the entire machine before running. My battery and patience were running low, so I aborted the backup and tried a restore, instead. The main thing, in my mind, was to confirm that I could connect to the 3X from outside my network.

Clicking the “Restore” button gave me the option to restore one file or several. I then had the chance to browse to my chosen file and to select which backup I wanted to restore from. (I’d only made one, but had earlier opted to save 10 backups.) In order to be sure the restoration had worked, I restored it to a different directory.

And work it did. It took a little longer than I might have expected for a file of modest size, but I don’t think that was the fault of the 3X. That wi-fi connection was really slow. Not quite shades-of-dial-up slow, but I am reminded of the early days of the Web and the expression “Graybar land.”

So the verdict is: it works. You really can become your own online backup service provider. To make it work, of course, you need a place to set the 3X up. If you’re like me and work out of your home, you might need to make an arrangement with a colleague to each keep the other’s remote backup appliance. But the ideal customer is not the home office user, but the person who runs a small office with multiple computers—enough of them that paying for Mozy Pro for a year would more than cover the cost of buying one of these.

And now that that’s done, I can shut it off and hear myself think again.

PS In the week between the time I wrote this and the time I published it, 3X was named one of the 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors by Computer Reseller News.

When I posted on LinkedIn that I was looking for subjects for this week’s Backup Reminder, David Battino pointed me to a blog post over on O’Reilly Digital Media. The post dates back to January of this year and recounts the hard drive failure the author, Darwin Grosse, suffered at Christmas—whereupon he discovered his most recent backup was four months old.

Ouch.

Since that time, Darwin decided to save himself from himself by using Dropbox. I’d used Dropbox only once before, in the course of co-hosting the For Immediate Release podcast back in May, so I thought of it mostly as a file-sharing tool, a way to synchronize documents across computers. This is certainly handy, but synchronization is not, by itself, backup.

But it turns out that Dropbox does backup, too. “It stores two months of revisions online,” David said, “So when a file went corrupt, I could backtrack. And backing up takes zero effort. You save your current projects in your Dropbox folder on your PC and they get uploaded automatically.”

In order to see how this worked, I downloaded Dropbox for myself and installed it both on Enna (my main laptop) and Mena (my netbook). Once you install it, Dropbox creates a “My Dropbox” folder that automatically copies any files you put in it first onto your Dropbox account (free for up to 2 GB storage, with plans starting at $4.99 month thereafter) and then onto any other computer you install the program on.

I can see how this will save me from crushed-USB-stick syndrome as long as I create and store any notes I take on Mena in the My Dropbox folder, and that’s great.

I’m learning, however, that instantaneous/continuous/copy-even-as-you-create-the-file backup is not a particularly good idea for all kinds of files. For instance, don’t try to make a backup of a Skype recording while you’re recording it. Bad things will happen. (In my case, it froze up my entire machine after about 15 minutes. If you have more RAM than I do, it might take longer for that to happen. Or not.) Create the recording first, save it, and then put it into the Dropbox. If you’re using something like Memeo Instant Backup that doesn’t restrict itself to one folder, turn it off or pause it until you’re making the recording.

But back to Dropbox and its backup-specific tools. Once you’ve installed Dropbox and put some files into your My Dropbox folder, you’ll notice their icons are overlaid with little green checkmarks. This appears to mean they have been successfully uploaded and synced. When you right-click on an item in the Dropbox, you see a new option, “Dropbox,” which gives you the option to see previous versions of the file. If you click on the link, it takes you to the web interface, where you can choose to either preview or restore earlier versions of the file.

On the plus side, Dropbox is easy to use and has multiple applications. It’s instantaneous as long as you’re connected to the Internet; if you aren’t, it will sync as soon as you have a connection again. And it really does provide for backup as well as synchronization, because, although it replicates changes across all the computers you have connected to it, it saves those previous versions.

On the minus side, only files in the “My Dropbox” folder get backed up. I suppose you could tell Outlook to store your .pst file in there…but I’m not sure you’d like the results, given what I said earlier about the potential negative effects of attempting to back things up while they’re in the process of changing. Outlook’s .pst file is one of those that doesn’t take well to being copied while it’s open. So if you want to use Dropbox for e-mail backups, you probably have to do it manually, and it’s not going to provide true e-mail synchronization anyway. Likewise, you’re going to need to remember to put certain other kinds of files into the Dropbox in order to get them backed up.  You’re probably safe enough letting things like Office docs just live there.

I don’t know that I would recommend Dropbox as a replacement for a dedicated online backup solution. I think too much is likely to get left out, and at least some of the online backup providers can handle backing up your e-mail. But I definitely recommend Dropbox for people who want to share and sync files and provide themselves with some extra backup redundancy in the process.

Finally, Dropbox hired CommonCraft to make their “tour” video, and I can’t resist including it here even though it doesn’t really address the backup features of the product.

P.S. If you use this link to sign up for Dropbox, you and I both get an extra 250 MB free storage space. It’s part of their campaign to get more users. I don’t know whether that quite counts as an affiliate link, but I’m pretty sure the arrangement is something the FTC would want me to disclose under their new rules.

I can’t see that anyone loses by it, though. I genuinely like Dropbox and think it’s going to be helpful for me. If you need to keep documents synchronized between computers or in a workgroup, you’ll probably find it useful, too.

When I first heard about Memeo Instant Backup, I objected that no program that backed up your entire hard drive could possibly be “instant.” Hard drives are getting bigger and bigger, so copying them takes longer and longer.

Robert Phillips explained to me that the “instant” part refers to the fact that the backup process starts instantly: as soon as you install the product, it begins backing you up. You don’t have to tell Instant Backup anything except where you want it to put your files. It’s designed to be easy enough for your grandparents to use, and the author of the press release tried it on hers to make sure.

I was expecting something designed to compete with Rebit, but that’s not quite what I got. Memeo Instant Backup is simple, yes. It’s got a colorful, friendly user interface, and it gets right down to work. It even works pretty quickly, and after the initial backup, its continuous monitoring doesn’t put too much drain on the system. But it’s got a little truth in advertising problem that you need to know about.

The reason I was expecting a software version of Rebit was this statement: “Protect your entire computer instantly. All files on your C drive will be included in the backup plan.” As I found out after running Memeo Instant Backup, this is simply not true. Let’s walk through it and see if you can spot what’s missing.

One minor but early irritation was the inability to choose which directory to install the program to, but that’s because I’m a “power user” type. The people this product is aimed at don’t care about things like that, if they even know they’re an option. There are very few options available in Memeo Instant Backup, but that’s a deliberate move to avoid confusing the user. In essence, there are two things you can do: back up everything, or restore everything. Oh, and you can pause a backup while it’s running if you need to, say, move or rename a file you just downloaded.

The interface is attractive and easy to understand. An illustration of a computer monitor shows the relative proportions of the different kinds of data you have on your machine, while a progress bar shows how much of the available space on your backup device is occupied.

(In case you’re wondering, I chose the new Metro drive from Buffalo as the backup destination.)

Those colorful icons and the size of the completed backup should be your first hint that Memeo Instant Backup is not really backing up the entire C drive. Enna is a fairly old laptop, so my C drive is only 80 GB, though I have a second 80 GB drive built in, as well. Right now my C drive is about half full: I’ve used 40.2 GB. The size of that backup is 15.4 GB.

What’s missing? The obvious answer is “program files.” Memeo refers specifically to documents, pictures, music, videos, and “others.” If you look at the actual backup destination folder, that’s even more explicit. Instant Backup avoids operating system folders and default program installation folders, so the “Program Files” and “Windows” directories are conspicuous by their absence, are many of the subfolders from “Documents and Settings.”

Leaving out the system files is fair enough, though I don’t think you can make a truthful claim to back up an entire drive if you skip them. But there’s something else missing here, and it’s a pretty big oversight.

Not one of those folders contains my Outlook PST folder. For the uninitiated, Outlook stores all its data in a folder called Outlook.pst that’s stored in Documents and Settings\User Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook. You will notice there is no such folder here. That means that my e-mail, calendar, and contacts are not backed up. (Well, not by Memeo. I am, of course, backing them up.) Maybe the assumption is that everybody’s grandparents use Yahoo! or Gmail or Hotmail.

At least the fact that these files and folders neatly replicate the structure on your C drive means that it’s possible to restore a single file via drag and drop, because you can’t do it through the Memeo Instant Backup restore interface. The only option there is to restore all your files, though you do get the choice of whether to restore them to their original location or an alternative location. Whether you will ever then be able to delete them from that alternative location seems to be an open question.

Memeo Premium Backup lets you restore individual files and has other features that the less expensive Instant Backup lacks. I’ve written about its predecessors before if you’re interested.

Instant Backup seems to do a pretty good job at the things it does. I do think the lack of e-mail backup is a serious drawback for anyone who uses a POP mail client, and that the claim to back up “your entire drive” should be adjusted to something more factual. Nevertheless, I like the program as a tool for technophobes who need to back up their photos, documents, and music. It’s friendly, easy to use, and unobtrusive. It will also probably improve in subsequent versions, the way Memeo’s other products have.

So right after he finished explaining to me that he really couldn’t take the time to evaluate StarWind’s products, the Ur-Guru went ahead and did it anyway. And here’s what he had to say about them. There are a lot of technical terms in this post, partly because it’s about enterprise software, and partly because enterprise software products are more complex and partly because the author is (though he won’t admit it) a geek.

As I said in the call for reviewers, StarWind’s products are suitable for businesses with multiple PCs and a network who want to store (and back up) their data in a central location. ISCSI is just a technology that lets your computer talk to disks over the network the way it would if they were installed in your system, but if you want more details, follow the links to the Wikipedia definitions.

And if you have no interest at all in enterprise products—even for smaller enterprises—skip this and wait until next week, when I’ll be talking about something friendlier to ordinary humans.

StarWind Software approached Sallie about writing a review about their products and guess who got to play around with it instead? Yep, me, the guy known as Ur-Guru. Why? Oh, because I happen to have some servers sitting around that would make a good SAN.

Before I continue I have to say that even though my home office comes close to what you might find in a small enterprise or rack server I have very little need for a SAN (Storage Area Network), because every single system is already loaded up with many terabytes of fast RAID storage. A SAN, regardless of the size, speed, and cost, would always be slower than the local storage of each system.

However, if I wanted to centralize the storage for the systems in the network, whereby the systems themselves were smaller, less top-heavy computers, I would certainly be looking at something like StarWind Server or StarWind Enterprise Server (probably the latter because I like the replication features).

Also, if I were to overhaul the way my virtual machines are managed and stored throughout my network, and if I wanted to create a single cluster of systems to run that, StarWind would certainly get an even closer look.

So what is StarWind Server, you might ask. If you’ve familiarized yourself with the concept of a SAN, the short version of the story is that StarWind Server is a software product that turns a Windows 2003 or Windows 2008 server into a fully capable iSCSI SAN system.

Think of it as having storage space on your system that isn’t local but remote and runs over a network. I could get into how to build a complete SAN network and recommend fiber-channel switches and how to hook it all up for the best performance and manageability but I’m going to restrain myself and focus on how a more modest SAN setup could be of use for the “power user” or small business.

What I tested was a combination of StarWind Server combined with the Starport iSCSI Initiator and AoE Initiator. Lots of terms you may have never heard, but in essence, Starport contains the drivers required for a system to use iSCSI over the network in order to use storage space on the StarWind Server SAN by connecting to it and making it appear as if the storage is a device or disk connected to your computer. In technical terms it is connected, except it’s connected over the network.

Installation

Installing the StarWind Server was a breeze, especially since it’s a very small installation with a very modest memory footprint. After installation I connected to the local system via the StarWind Management Console (the application that allows you to configure your SAN) and created an Image File Device of 800GB on one of the arrays on the system I installed it on. If you must know, the system I used for testing is a Dual Xeon E5472 with 32GB of RAM and 6.4 Terabyte of RAID-5 storage split over eight 300GB Seagate Cheetah HDDs and four 1000GB Samsung Spinpoint HDDs, running 64-bit Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2 (that’s SP2, not R2). StarWind Server (and the Starport) support both 64-bit and 32-bit systems, of course.

When specifying an Image File device it complained that I didn’t give it the right file extension (*.img). I think the developers at StarWind might have to look at this and add a few lines of code that will automatically add the extension if the user forgets to add it. It’s the small things that matter when it comes to having a smooth end-user experience. The Image File Device created on the StarWind server is really just a large file that has the size you specified when creating it. So what StarWind Server does is, while running on top of Windows Server and its regular file system, create large files to actually store the data.

Because I never install anything relating to drivers for testing purposes on systems I use for my daily work I decided to give the Starport software a try by installing it on a virtual machine (VM, for short) that ran on one of my workstations. Again the installation was a breeze and the memory footprint of the StarPort iSCSI initiator is very small. I’m glad to see some companies still care about writing efficient software that isn’t bloated to the point where you wonder what’s bigger, the OS or the application running on it. The VM I used had a local pre-allocated disk of 80GB and was assigned 4GB of memory, running Windows 7 64-bit. (I’m not even sure if StarWind supports Windows 7 at this stage but I didn’t run into any major problems seeing as how most Vista x64 drivers will run fine in Windows 7 x64 anyway).

After specifying the license to use for Starport I added a Remote iSCSI Device to is via its management console, gave it the name (or IP address) of the server that was running the StarWind Server and it immediately connected me to the Image File Device I created there. Next up, I opened up the Computer Management on the VM, headed for Disk Management, and saw “Disk 1” in there which was in fact the Image File Device on the remote server. From there on it’s a piece of cake, you partition and format the volume the way you need to and voila, you’ve got yourself a bunch of storage that looks like it’s local to the system but is really running elsewhere over the network. Smooth! I now had an F:\ drive on the VM.

Performance

Of course the real test for a SAN would be to see how it performs when you start throwing things at it. In this case, a lot of files of varying sizes.

I’m pleased to see the performance was quite spectacular. The network in my home office is all 1Gbit running through a solid HP Procurve 24 port switch using jumbo frames. Copying data to the new F:\ drive was fast. On average I got around 65MB/s with peaks on the larger files of 90MB/s. To compare, these are very acceptable given that SMB2 copies (when you copy files from one system to another over the network via Windows Server 2008 and Vista/W7 systems) usually runs around the same for files of varying sizes with peaks of over 100MB/s for larger files.

Clearly, there is not much of a bottleneck with StarWind Server and I’ve seen SAN setups that perform so poorly that you’d wonder why so much money was thrown at it when it performs that badly. Having said that, there was a noticeable hit on the performance I normally have between the systems but for one, I was running tests through a VM and secondly the data is being written to an Image File Device which, of course, comes with a bit of overhead.

By now some of you might be thinking “OK, I understood half of what you’re on about so what would I want all this for?” Well, that depends whether you may have a need for SAN or whether sharing files between systems via a NAS is sufficient for your needs. SAN and NAS are often confused, even though both serve more specific purposes that the other doesn’t. I’m more a NAS guy than a SAN guy depending on the situation and the setup.

I would really prefer a SAN configuration (over NAS) if I were building a set of servers that are virtualized and centralized in a rack. Either to have the SAN provide storage to the VM’s or act as the storage for the VMs.

StarWind also offers a free version of their software, which comes with limitations (like a max. 2TB storage size) but should give you something to look at and give a try without having to overhaul your entire network and jump in off the deep end into the world of SAN. However, the Server and Enterprise Server versions offer more than just basic Image File storage and include support for a RAM Drive Device. If you have a really large server with a good deal of RAM you could designate some of that RAM as storage space.

The performance of that is hundreds, if not thousands of times faster than disk based storage. But RAM comes at a higher cost and I wouldn’t recommend using RAM disks for actual storage unless you have redundancy in the system and can deal with situations where a server might blow up, break down, or simply stops working for any of a million temporary or catastrophic reasons. In addition other device types are also supported like Virtual DVD devices, Disk Bridges (where your storage/partitions on the server are actual volumes/drives), SPTI devices (which allow any physical storage device, including DVD, tape, etc. to be used as iSCSI targets that your client machines can connect to), Virtual Tape device (which emulates a tape drive while using disk based storage via StarWind VTL). There’s quite a few options there that make StarWind Server a very interesting choice when creating a SAN on your network.

But as always, just like RAID IS NOT BACKUP (it is redundancy) don’t mistake SAN for a way to back up important files if all you rely on is the continuous operation and solidity of the SAN. As always, you have to ensure you have backups and that’s where my favorite feature of StarWind Enterprise Server comes into the mix; it allows two SAN servers to replicate data, much the same as a RAID1 mirror. Except, of course, the mirroring happens between two physical SAN servers instead of all on the same single hardware box. This is most definitely something that shouldn’t be overlooked when building a SAN.

Another good-to-have feature in StarWind Enterprise Server is the Snapshot and CDP (Continuous Data Protection) Device which allows you to create virtual drives that support backing up and snapshots (taking a backup of a certain state at a certain point in time).

The good…

To conclude, my experience installing and using the StarWind Server and Starport has been a good one. These aren’t the kind of scary server applications that come with a ton of overhead and require a study of many days to get a grip on the configuration. The management console windows to configure both the server and client side are well laid out, simple to understand, and offer exactly what you need without a huge amount of complicating factors. If you’re looking for a SAN without the headache, I think Starwind certainly has what you need.

The bad…

The only bad thing is that I didn’t get to use StarWind Server in daily production use, mostly because it would be a step backward for me in terms of storage and performance and what I really would have liked to test this on would have been a system with 50+ client systems with two mirrored SANs using CDP over a 10Gbit fiber-channel network. Alas, I don’t have any of that sitting around here to toy with. If I had, however, I’d probably go back to StarWind and see if I could get a good deal on promoting their software by showing how it operates in my home office. :-)

And now it’s back to my adventures in WordPress, with a reminder to everyone to upgrade in a timely fashion: there’s a nasty worm going around that attacks popular content management systems like WordPress and Joomla.