SmartFiler Virtual Backup Appliances are ideally suited for service providers to offer offsite data backup service to their clients.  SmartPick’s Secure-Pair technology ensures that each client’s backup data is contained in a separate virtual appliance in the service provider’s data center, accessible only by the corresponding paired onsite SmartFiler appliance at the client site, ensuring data privacy and security for each client. The solution is inherently scalable and is limited only by the hardware infrastructure at the client site and the service provider’s data center.

Implementation Overview

A typical client location will consist of many servers and desktops in a LAN.  A typical service provider infrastructure will comprise of multiple servers in virtualized environment with back-end SAN or NAS storage. A service provider with just an handful of clients may have a simple data center infrastructure of half-rack with a PC and NAS storage.

Though the product as downloaded are configured for use with VMware Player or VMware Workstation, it can be converted to VMware ESX environment.  The implementation example shown below will still be the same, after conversion.

Install and configure an Onsite SmartFiler Virtual Appliance in a client site LAN.  For the first full backup, install and configure an Offsite SmartFiler Virtual Appliance also in the same LAN, on a removable storage such as a USB disk or a NAS device that can be transported later to a remote offsite location.  Pair the two SmartFilers using the onsite SmartFiler’s web user interface.  SmartPick’s Secure-Pair technology now ensures that these SmartFilers communicate only with each other securely.  Access from any other computer will be denied.

Using the Onsite SmartFiler’s simple web user interface select shared folders from any system on the LAN, configure a backup policy, and let the initial full backup complete.  After the successful initial backup, shutdown the Offsite SmartFiler through its web user interface.  Unplug the removable storage device and take it to the Service Provider’s data center.

At the service provider’s data center, copy the contents (the folder named SFBV-XXXX) of the removable storage device to a local storage, which may be SAN or NAS storage.  Open the SmartFilerOS.vmx using VMware Player or VMware Workstation.  Configure this Offsite SmartFiler with a LAN IP in the data center network.

In the firewall at the client site and at the data center, open the SSH port configured in these SmartFilers (Default:22222, it may be changed) and forward it to the SmartFilers in their respective LAN. Now pair the two SmartFilers again, using the external IP of the data center as the offsite IP and the external IP of the client site for the onsite IP.

The implementation is complete now and the backups will happen onsite and offsite per your schedule and backup policy.

The same process is repeated for each client.  Figure-1 shows an example of a service provider implementation for 8 clients.

Licensing

The SmartFiler Virtual Backup Appliance license applies to a set of paired SmartFilers.  The price of each license depends on the storage size.  The example shown above requires 8 licenses.

For example:

• A reseller buys a 250GB SmartFiler Virtual Appliance license at 30% discount.  Based on the list price of $499 and a reseller discount of 25%, the reseller price would be $375.
• The reseller may sell this at the list price to their client and have a one-time profit of $125.
• The service provider may offer onsite and offsite backup as service, hosting the offsite SmartFiler in their data center, at $125 per month ($0.50/GB/month) and get recurring revenue of $1500 per year per client. 
• A service provider with as little as 20 clients can generate an additional revenue of $30,000 per year recurring revenue.