MCI launches new tape-less backup service

MCI today introduced a managed data protection service that dispenses with the use of traditional tape medium back ups. The MCI’s new Enhanced Smart Backup, which initially is being marketed only to the carrier’s enterprise hosting customers, allows corporate users to rapidly restore critical company information in case of virtually any type of data loss.

"It ranges from ‘oops I deleted the file’ to really dealing with a major disaster," said Rick Dyer, director of product management for MCI Hosting.

The service uses a disk-to-disk technology developed by Avamar that eliminates the use of tapes, which have proven to be both faulty and time consuming. In traditional backup services, companies typically do complete backups once a week and do incremental backups on a daily basis. However, about 27% of the time, apparently successful backups cannot be restored, according to the Enterprise Strategy Group.

"A lot times, the backup media as it writes to tape, there isn’t a great deal of error correction," Dyer said. "Also, the problem with tape is every time you dump to tape you’ve got physical costs."

The new approach MCI uses is to do a complete backup during the initial time frame and then replicate that data to its second data center for storage. Additionally, the company is using a hashing algorithm that creates what amounts to an index of backed up data. On subsequent backups only data that has changed is rewritten.

"It divides up the disk subsystem into smaller blocks and then uses hashing algorithms to tag the data," Dyer said. "The idea is that using disk-to-disk technology, we can back it up faster than we do today and it’s going to cost less."

Initially MCI is launching the product only to hosting customers and is pricing it at $9.75 per month per GB protected data. MCI is targeting the service as customers who use database files that change often. However, the company likely won’t market to industries such as health care and financial that are required to keep records for years. The Enhanced Smart Backup will store records for 90 days.