You might be surprised to learn that our online backup system hosts more than four times the data it would take to store the entire Library of Congress. In 2004 Architel began offering our client’s a free online backup solution and today almost all of them take advantage of it. Over the years the product has evolved. First, we began installing an on-site appliance to allow for a local backup of our client’s data. Only after a local backup has been created will our backup system carry that data to the servers in our data center. Finally, we use Amazon’s EC2 cloud to backup data that is local to our data center (i.e. the server being secured is in our data center). The data being created and stored by our clients is growing at an unsustainable rate – unsustainable in the sense that the current DS1/T1 infrastructure won’t support off-site backup for very much longer. Of course Architel isn’t in the telecom business – but we are being forced to solve various ‘telecom’ problems as I noted back in March in a post titled, “The next frontier for MSPs: Unified Communications“.

To that end, more and more of our clients have been working with Jeff Rothell and his team at SevenLayer (an Architel Labs graduate) to ensure their telecom circuits meet their technology needs. For many North Texas businesses it is possible install 100Mbps (71 times faster than a T1) for less than $2,000 per month (not much more than many are spending for T1s today). In other cases it is possible to double or quadruple bandwidth for just a few hundred dollars per month. Of course location is key to acquisition of affordable bandwidth. When we began looking for a new location for our Network Operations Center, access to fiber (fiber connected to competitive bandwidth providers) was key. Our needs are in the gigabyte speed range (primarily due to our need to connect to our clients at 100Mbps speeds). Our new facility has fiber from various providers making it a perfect location for high-bandwidth needs.