A conversation with Marc Shaffer, CEO of US DataVault

Ask Marc Shaffer and he'll tell you... "The success or failure of a data vaulting services aimed at small to medium sized businesses comes down to Bear 's and Fred 's". The CEO of US DataVault said recently that a "Bad Experience At Restore" ( BEAR ) can affect customer confidence in the use of a remote service provider to replace his in-house tape backup process, but a "Failure to Restore Expected Data" ( FRED ) can really louse up a deal.

He says that the accepted remedy provided to customers who encounter problems with his burgeoning data backup business is a refund of their money, but the need to execute this codicil just never comes up. With over 100 customer sign-ups per quarter, Shaffer says the service is well on its way to success.

US DataVault is a three-year-young data protection service provider based in Nashville , TN , which targets "small to enterprise sized businesses and small branch offices of large companies" with its service-based replacement for in-house tape backup.

The company's offerings key on the increased availability of high-bandwidth network on-ramps to the Internet such as xDSL, and technologies developed by US DataVault to address the failure rate of backup and other issues of secure data transfer to the company's vaulting facility. Shaffer goes on to say that "The 'last mile' situation is working for us, with more and more companies getting access to high speed pipes at affordable prices, and so is the increasing pain associated with traditional backup."

Shaffer cites Gartner Group numbers to support the claim that tape backups fail nearly half the time, "and that's in Class A data centers. Outside Class A data centers, where most of the 6 million SMBs in the USA live, the failure rate is even higher."

"Who needs the hassle of tape", he asks, when there is a viable service-based alternative? US DataVault deploys a "load and go" software package, "installed on the dominant server in the customer's LAN," which is then used to replicate customer-selected data across the Internet to US DataVault's "Class A vaulting environment." Shaffer explains that the Internet connection is made secure through US DataVault's private networking technology and makes use of the largely unused upload capabilities of high bandwidth net connections.

"We offer customers complete control over who can request a data restore, an important consideration in law firms, financial service companies, government organizations, and medical and health care firms," Shaffer notes. He adds that customers can monitor the process on-line and are provided with Service Level Agreement (SLA)-based guarantees of performance and privacy.

The cost of the US DataVault service starts at $25 for 5 GB's and prices per GB go down significantly as a company's needs for storage increases,"this is more than made up for, according to the CEO, by the reduction of software, hardware, and labor costs for "unreliable, in-house, tape backup solutions." He claims his current sign-up rate indicates the beginning of a trend that he hopes will sweep through the six million or so companies comprising the SMB market.

The company is also working with channel partners, especially service providers for law firms, medical services firms, and financial information companies, to deliver the US Datavault offering as an add-on to their other services. "We are a value-add for these partners and hope to lock down channel partners that will enable us to gain a major part of the $3 billion market currently going to internal tape."