The vast bulk of international submarine fibres to Aus have their landing points in Sydney. You then have the expensive exercise of finding intrastate/interstate backhaul or dark fibre providers. Some of the prices get eye-watering very quickly. If you’re looking for geographic redundancy for OSB, then the marketplace is going to point you to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. There’s some call for Brisbane landing points for submarine fibre, but again, interstate backhaul is the killer, given the bulk of the traffic will transit through Sydney anyway.

The stupid thing is that it would be cheaper to provide the redundancy back to the States, unless you’re able to cut a sweetheart deal with a dark fibre provider.

Strategically speaking, Offsite Backup is a difficult monster to deploy properly because from our standpoint it requires a geographic redundancy – otherwise whats the point, you’re just moving your single point of failure to another location where it usually has the same odds of disappearing should something go significantly wrong.

We do have the OSB service in Australia, but it is used internally exclusively. We are currently limited with our data centers in Australia because Equinix only has two and they are both in Sydney, so we couldn’t honestly offer this service and say its the same service we offer in United States or Europe. United States is bridgeheaded in Dallas, replicated to Chicago and Los Angeles, providing triple replication on enterprise class gear – NOBODY other than Iron Mountain has that kind of a solution not to mention at $1/GB. Our European solution has a bridgehead in Maidenhead, UK with replication to Netherlands, so again, geographically redundant with completely different set of links and ability to restore data when it is needed the most.

In short, it’s not just a “bandwidth” issue for us, but its easier to blame it on the fact that we haven’t sold a single Gb of it in Australia The secret to success is knowing who to blame for your failures.

-Vlad

Besides, you got Susanne Dansey and now you got affordable Exchange and SharePoint 2007 – so I see it as a victory that the only complaint is over photoshopping the Exchange logo onto the crocks face!

Question of the day with the recent launches seems to be: “You can’t possibly be making any money on this, will it be here tomorrow?” – which is a fair question to ask. So I’ll address it here before I address it in a note to follow:

(1) No, we are not making as high of a profit margin as we do in United States.

(2) The business line is already profitable. Otherwise we wouldn’t have done it to begin with, only fools that play with other peoples money would introduce a loss leader as a major line of business, since we don’t operate our business on debt we have a different approach to product design and deployment.

When we designed our USA lines of business there were no affordable 400GB Serial Attached SCSI drives for less than $500, there were no 12 port SAS or SCSI controllers, there were no “green” power supplies or hard drives that could variably switch from 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM. There were no light aluminum chasis with adequate cooling and crating and shipping the usual 100lb+ monsters in crates would mean months of delays and inability to scale.

Times change. With the changing times we really wanted to embrace all our partners around the world and the growing distrust in storing information in United States and we wanted to do it in the least complex way – same price, same service, same storage limits. Doing so gives us predictable pricing, global presence and regionally powered services. In a nutshell, you know what its going to cost you to run this service out of any of our data centers, you know that you’ll always get the fastest possible experience without the government and regulatory issues that come with storing your customers data on servers that are not in your country.

There is always that concern that somehow a $10 Mailbox will destroy the infrastructure business. I for one do not believe that to be the case. These services appeal to the exact opposite type of a customer than the one that spends tens of thousands of dollars on building servers and licensing and complex onsite solutions. I don’t think those folks are going to drag all that to the trash overnight. However, the same platform can be delivered at $10 a month cost to your bottom line, so try to consider the opportunities you now have to roll your own SharePoint applications, business consulting, mobility solutions, managed portals and collaboration tools to the customers that want all that but don’t want a server? I happen to run a large multimillion dollar business based on giving people what they want – and believe me, if you look, you will find people that will pay a pretty penny for solutions but aren’t interested in owning computer hardware and licensing associated with it. Who are you not to take their money???????????????????

I think we stand to make a lot of money being the first mover, I think our partners stand to make a lot of money with a whole slew of new services that can be provided to a whole new audience, and I think the “global price leveling” is going to help us all make money.

-Vlad

The history to zero demand for offsite backups is the charge-per-bit for uploads and downloads, which went away (except for the incumbent – Telstra) and is now making a comeback due to the 1:1 traffic profiles that ISPs are now hitting, with the bulk of ISPs now running at full capacity on their uplinks (thank P2P for all of that).

It might go away with Pipe Networks PPC-1 cable to Guam to help break the trans-Pacific pricing duopoly, but we’re still waiting. NBN will gobble up any price savings anyway.

Oh, and smearing your face with Vegemite will keep the dropbears away. And everyone else too