Big data strains small-business bandwidth

Sooner or later, small businesses encounter many of the same challenges big businesses face — and it’s happening now, big time, with rampant data growth. You’d think the burden of the data explosion would fall primarily on storage infrastructure. In fact, for many small businesses, WAN bandwidth is proving to be the biggest bottleneck.

Storage vendors seem to be doing a great job staying on top of the demand for ever larger data densities and software to allow you to make more efficient use of it (think dedupe and intelligent thin provisioning). But for the most part, you can’t say the same about the telcos and ISPs providing the wide area networks we’re using to acquire and share that data. This is particularly a problem in rural areas, where many small high-tech companies have decided to locate themselves for cost and lifestyle reasons.

A case in point

Recently, I started a long-term technology planning discussion with a client that’s dealing with this very challenge. It’s a small, growing engineering firm that boils down raw geophysical data into structured data that can be consumed by customers. This data is huge — a single job often involves more than a terabyte of raw data and a comparable amount of intermediate work product. Business is good: What used to be an operation of a few engineers in one location is poised to grow into a number of satellite locations with increasing reliance on partners and remote contractors.

Here’s where things get tricky. Efficiently moving and analyzing terabytes of data on a local network is hard enough, requiring a strong helping of SSD and 10Gbps Ethernet to keep things flowing. But the impending need to move beyond that local office and make that data and work product available to a wider group of distributed employees and contractors turns a tough, but surmountable problem into a nearly impossible one.

You might look at the amounts of data and unpredictable growth rates involved and conclude that this is an excellent application for the scalability and flexibility offered by the cloud. You’d be right except for one factor: Much of the workflow centers around highly graphical 3D CAD modeling that would make leveraging the cloud very difficult. Instead, this company of less than 100 employees has found itself contemplating the same model used by multinational aerospace and defense contractors with highly graphical workloads and distributed employee bases: virtualized or blade-based workstations co-located with high-capacity storage and a user experience delivered via a protocol like Teradici’s PCoIP.

Even with this type of model, bandwidth is still a huge problem. Though protocols like PCoIP can deliver a solid user experience, even for highly graphical workloads, they don’t sip bandwidth like ICA and RDP do. They often require several megabits of bandwidth per session to maintain a lossless experience, even more if multiple monitors are involved. Though this might not seem like very much, when you aggregate the activities of tens of simultaneous workloads, you’ve suddenly eliminated almost all types of Internet connections commonly used by small business and entered the rarified — and expensive — air occupied by such solutions as DS3, SONET, ATM, and Metro-Ethernet.

That’s fine and dandy if your office is in a major metro area where dark fiber is in abundance and providers are willing to hook you up at these massive bandwidths. But if you’re out in the sticks, you might have to contemplate moving your office simply because you can’t get the bandwidth you need or can’t find a solution that will be reliable enough to bet your business on. After all, if you’re hosting your data in co-lo or in the cloud, if your Internet pipe goes down, you might as well close the office and go home.

Not alone

This client’s dilemma is fairly unique. Not every small business struggles with data densities that can be measured in terabytes per employee (though it’s really just an issue of when, not if, that will be true). But the underlying challenge of acquiring reliable, fast WAN bandwidth is not confined to these exceptional circumstances.

As small businesses consider the cloud and other hosted solutions, they have to determine if they can rely on their WAN/Internet connection just as they weigh the reliability of the cloud providers they’re considering. For many, this may already be the reason they can’t really consider making the move yet. It will be interesting to see how telcos and ISPs react to this growing demand.

This article, “Big data strains small-business bandwidth,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Matt Prigge’s Information Overload blog and follow the latest developments in storage at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.