Category Archives: Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity

Asigra, Asigra Cloud Backup, Asigra Cloud Backup Connector Appliance, Cloud Connector Backup Appliance, Data recovery, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Hardware, Remote backup service, Storage

Asigra Cloud Backup Appliance Offers Distributed Enterprise Data Recovery

Asigra Inc. has announced volume shipping of the company’s Cloud Backup Connector Appliance. The Asigra Cloud Backup Connector Appliance leverages the Cisco ISR G2 router and UCS E-Series server blade and includes the latest version of Asigra Cloud Backup software. The appliance provides onsite backup data storage and the ability to replicate to external cloud service providers at the user’s discretion for both local and remote recovery.

For globally distributed mid-market and enterprise organizations with multiple branch offices, the Asigra Cloud Connector provides more efficient use of storage and networking resources. The appliance provides a new and innovative way to bring flexible end-to-end enterprise-class data recovery to organizations. The Cloud Backup Connector appliance ensures that branch-office users receive LAN-like performance from their cloud backup application and that data is highly available and handled in a secure manner. The improved linkage of the network with Asigra cloud-enabled services contributes to increased performance and enhanced end-user experience.

“Our network had become increasingly more complex, storage was growing and our previous backup solution was struggling to keep pace,” said Simon Johnson, Finance Director at Opus Trust. By implementing the Cloud Connector Backup Appliance powered by Asigra, we simplified the infrastructure and improved the levels of data protection and recovery across all of our network and applications. We now have local backup to disk, automated offsite backup and a complete IT DR plan through the OnDemand Recovery service, implemented by Project Vision.”

“Our switch to the Cloud Backup Connector Appliance helped the company to achieve several business benefits,” said David Van Eck, Head of IT at L.K. Bennett. “Through a centralized online monitoring portal made available by our service provider, Backup Technology Ltd., we receive guaranteed backup and recovery for all of our data systems as a professional and fully managed service. The backup forms the basis for our enterprise-wide data recovery solution, which is essential to L.K. Bennett.”

The Cloud Backup Connector Appliance features:

  • Asigra Cloud Backup v12.2 pre-installed for plug-and-play mass deployment and agentless protection of all computing environments
  • The ability to perform standalone local backup and/or connect to the service provider of choice for offsite recovery
  • End-to-end data protection of storage, servers, desktops, laptops and mobile devices (tablets and smartphones)
  • High-performance data recovery across physical, virtual and cloud operating environments
  • Autonomic healing to ensure data integrity/recoverability
  • Enterprise-class security for regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services and government with FIPS 140-2 certification
  • 2TB internal storage standard which scales to 10TB per appliance to store compressed, de-duplicated data for local recovery
  • Capability to leverage external cloud service providers for offsite data recovery
  • Connectivity: Three integrated 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports with 1 port capable of RJ-45 or SFP connectivity, one service module slot, three onboard digital signal processor slots and one internal service module for application services

Amazon AWS, Amazon Glacier, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Riverbed Technology, Storage, Whitewater

Riverbed Upgrades Storage Appliances, Seeks to Leverage Amazon Glacier Backup

Riverbed Technology today announced it has expanded its Whitewater cloud storage appliance family with the addition of new hardware models and upgrades to its operating system. The new Riverbed Whitewater appliances and OS provide more capacity, faster ingest speeds and more replication options. These features and capabilities make the new Whitewater appliances a critical component for enterprises wishing to leverage the economical price and reliability of cloud storage options such as Amazon Glacier.

Enhancements include new Whitewater model appliances with up to triple the cache of previous models and support of up to 14.4 petabytes of logical data. The Whitewater Operating System (WWOS) 3.0 also offers new features, including pairwise replication that enable enterprises to replicate to an additional Whitewater appliance at a secondary location. In addition, enterprises can now leverage the 10 gigabit networking interface that dramatically improves ingest performance.

Customers that deploy the Whitewater 3030 model appliance can save more than $750,000 over a three year period when backing up to Amazon Glacier. With varying requirements for recovery time objectives (RTO) of certain data sets, the ability to recover certain data sets locally and immediately has also become increasingly important.

The new WWOS 3.0 offers support for pairwise replication for Whitewater appliances that allows enterprises greater flexibility to choose the appropriate recovery option to meet their RTO based on their business continuity plans. For the fastest RTO, a Whitewater appliance can recover at disk speed to a secondary site. In addition, the new OS offers a pinning feature that allows enterprises to tier and choose which backup data sets are available on the Whitewater appliance cache for immediate access, while less critical backup data sets can be recovered from the cloud.

The three new Whitewater model (730, 2030, 3030) appliances offer between 8 to 96 TB usable cache capacity. The largest model, WWA-3030, can cache up to three times the amount of data as the previous largest model (3010) and can support backup & archive datasets of up to 14.4 petabytes[1] before it is compressed and deduplicated onto the local cache.

For faster performance, enterprises can also choose to use 10 gigabit networking interfaces to get up to 2.5 terabytes per hour ingest performance, a 40 percent increase over previous models. The 10 gigabit networking interface also enables enterprises to transfer to Amazon Glacier cloud storage leveraging Amazon Direct Connect.

Amazon AWS, Box, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, DropBox, GDrive, Google, Guest Post, Microsoft Exchange, Outlook.com, SearchYourCloud, SharePoint, Storage

Google, Amazon Outages a Real Threat For Those Who Rely On Cloud Storage

Guest Post by Simon Bain, CEO of SearchYourCloud.

It was only for a few minutes, however Google was down. This follows hot on the heels of the other major cloud provider Amazon being down for a couple of hours earlier in August. This even relatively short outage could be a real problem for organizations that rely on these services to store their enterprise information. I am not a great lover of multi-device synchronization, I mean all those versions kicking around your systems! However if done well, it could be one of the technologies that help save ‘Cloud Stores’ from the idiosyncrasies of the Internet and a connected life.

We seem to be currently in the silly season of outages, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google all stating that their problems were cause by a switch being replaced or an update going wrong.

These outages may seem small for the supplier. But they are massive for the customer, who is unable to access sales data or invoices for a few hours.

This however, should not stop people using these services. But it should make them shop around, and look at what is really on offer. A service that does not have synchronization may well sound great. But if you do not have a local copy of your document on the device that you are actually working on, and your connection goes down, for whatever reason, then your work will stop.

SearchYourCloud Inc. has recently launched SearchYourCloud, a new application that enables people to securely find and access information stored in Dropbox, Box, GDrive, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint or Outlook.com with a single search. Using either a Windows PC or any IOS device, SearchYourCloud will also be available for other clouds later in the year.

SearchYourCloud enables users to not only find what they are searching for, but also protects their data and privacy in the cloud.

Simon Bain

Simon Bain is Chief Architect and CEO of SearchYourCloud, and also serves on the Board of the Sun Microsystems User Group.

Backup, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Google, Google Apps, Partnerships, Spanning, Spanning Backup, Spanning Cloud Apps

Spanning Cloud Apps Launches Reseller Program for Spanning Backup

Spanning Cloud Apps, Inc., creators of Spanning Backup for Google Apps, has launched the Spanning Authorized Resellers Program.  Through the program, partners can provide their customers a product for protecting Google Apps data.

Spanning Backup provides backup and recovery of the complete Google Apps suite: Gmail, Drive, Sites, Calendar and Contacts.  The solution features a secure cloud-to-cloud environment for protecting Google Apps data and SSAE 16 Type II audited processes that ensure its integrity.  Spanning also provides constant monitoring of data backup, allowing administrators to correct issues before they become problems.

“We have designed a program that extends the value of reseller services, and brings together the key support pieces for their ongoing success,” said Jeff Erramouspe, chief revenue officer, Spanning.  “We’re excited to already be working with leading VARs and system integrators worldwide and look forward to expanding into new relationships.”

“As enterprises encounter obstacles in moving to the cloud, Spanning Backup provides a unique solution that solves the challenges facing our customers in North America, Europe and Asia,” said Doug Shepard, president of the Google Business Unit for Cloud Sherpas, the world’s largest cloud services brokerage and two-time Google Apps Global Partner of the Year.  “We look forward to a successful partnership with Spanning as we integrate their solution into an overall cloud strategy for our clients.”

Key features of the Spanning Authorized Reseller program include:

  • A discount structure with strong margins that gives reseller partners complete control over end-user pricing and a higher average revenue per user (ARPU); potential for increased ARPU by 60-80 percent over selling Google Apps alone
  • Lead referral and distribution of new business opportunities
  • A simple contracting process to get resellers into the market quickly and efficiently
  • Customized marketing programs for specific territories, market segments and business practices, including email marketing, webinars and other co-marketing activities

“We have found Spanning Backup to be an excellent platform for delivering value-added services to our clients,” said Rob Morgan, managing director for PIT Group in Wollongong, Australia.  “Managing data protection policies isn’t always easy and many of our customers contract with PIT Group to do that for them.  The Spanning program gave us the flexibility to bundle our services with Spanning Backup and deliver them both to our clients in one cost-effective package.”

Spanning has partners reselling Spanning Backup around the globe, including in North and South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia/New Zealand.

Backup, Cloud Storage, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, PC World, Remote backup service, Storage

Protecting and Preserving Our Digital Lives is a Task We Want to Have Already Done

I once read that a favorite writer of mine, when told by people he met at cocktail parties how much they “wanted to write,” would reply, “No, you want to have written.”

Protecting and preserving our digital lives is much the same — we want to have already taken care of it. We don’t actually want to go through the hassle of doing it.

An article by Rick Broida in PC World sums it up thus:

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who have lost critical data, and those who will. In other words, if you use technology long enough and neglect to back up your data, you’re guaranteed to have at least one extremely bad day.

The article goes on to outline “How to build a bulletproof cloud backup system without spending a dime“. There’s a lot to do, it all takes effort, but he’s right. Whether you take all his recommendations or some, it’s a good place to start thinking about the steps you (we) all need to take.

Here’s an idea: Come up with a plan and implement it in pieces until you get to the point where you know you are ready for the digital disaster that is out there waiting for us all.

 

Amazon, Amazon AWS, Backup, Cloud Storage, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Free, Remote backup service, Storage, Zoolz

Want 100 GB of Free Cloud Storage For Life?

Zoolz is promoting their cloud backup service with an offer to give the first million users 100 GB for free. For life. The catch? It uses AWS Glacier, Amazon’s cheaper alternative to S3. Glacier of course enforces a delay of 3 to 5 hours to retrieve files, and there are limits to monthly retrieval. But for the right purposes (like, “Store & Ignore”) it might be a real deal if you act soon enough. Their intro video explains:

Amazon, Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Cloud & IT Management, Cloud computing, Data center, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Hardware, James Hamilton, Networking

Wired Profiles a New Breed of Internet Hero, the Data Center Guru

The whole idea of cloud computing is that mere mortals can stop worrying about hardware and focus on delivering applications. But cloud services like Amazon’s AWS, and the amazingly complex hardware and software that underpins all that power and flexibility, do not happen by chance. This Wired article about James Hamilton paints of a picture of a new breed of folks the Internet has come to rely on:

…with this enormous success comes a whole new set of computing problems, and James Hamilton is one of the key thinkers charged with solving such problems, striving to rethink the data center for the age of cloud computing. Much like two other cloud computing giants — Google and Microsoft — Amazon says very little about the particulars of its data center work, viewing this as the most important of trade secrets, but Hamilton is held in such high regard, he’s one of the few Amazon employees permitted to blog about his big ideas, and the fifty-something Canadian has developed a reputation across the industry as a guru of distributing systems — the kind of massive online operations that Amazon builds to support thousands of companies across the globe.

Read the article.

 

Backup, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Unitrends, VMware

Unitrends Updates Backup and Recovery Suite

Unitrends today announced Unitrends Release 7.0, the next generation of software powering its physical and virtual backup and recovery appliances. Unitrends 7.0 bolsters data protection in virtualized and cloud environments, while providing an expanded range of platform and enterprise application support

Unitrends’ portfolio of physical (Recovery Series) and virtual (Unitrends Enterprise Backup™) appliances provide unified data protection across heterogeneous environments. Powered by Unitrends 7.0, these solutions now give companies unprecedented flexibility for optimizing backup and recovery in virtualized and cloud environments, with new capabilities including:

  • Hot-hot replication and retention – Simplifies disaster recovery by eliminating cumbersome and expensive two-step disaster recovery operations. This capability keeps disaster recovery sites active, online and continuously updated – expediting disaster recovery processes and preventing data loss due to backup windows.
  • Private virtual machine spin-up – Enables companies to instantly spin up a virtual machine in the cloud to add another layer of redundancy to their disaster recovery infrastructure. This capability can keep businesses running and data accessible even when on-premise locations experience total outages.
  • VMware® SAN direct backup and recovery – Reduces backup windows, recovery time objectives (RTOs) and local area network traffic by performing fabric-based backup and recovery of virtual machines residing on SAN storage.
  • Application-aware VMware backups – Enables increased application-aware integration for VMware host operating system (HOS)-based backups and ensures application consistency during and after the backup.
  • Private one–click recovery – Enables instant recovery for VMware on the replication target and direct bare metal recovery and system recovery at the off-site premise location.
  • Cloud-sourced deduplication – Increases cloud storage capacity and improves data retention by extending deduplication functionality to data in the cloud.

In addition to enhanced data protection in virtualized and cloud environments, Unitrends 7.0 also includes expanded enterprise application and platform support. In addition to SQL Server® and Microsoft® Exchange support, Unitrends now offers Oracle and Microsoft Office SharePoint support for native application protection – extending its robust, feature-rich data backup and recovery functionality to even more enterprise-level applications. Unitrends 7.0 also includes agent push simplification, which deploys install and upgrade Windows® agents from the backup appliance – decreasing total cost of ownership and lowering time-to-value.

“Having the ability to protect data across physical, virtual and cloud environments is essential to companies today, and our mission has always been to enable our customers to do this easily and affordably,” said Dr. Mark Campbell, chief strategy and technology officer at Unitrends. “Unitrends 7.0 extends our legacy by providing a broad range of capabilities that make it easy for companies to expedite backup and disaster recovery processes, ensure continuous access to data and maintain business operations regardless of what is happening around them.”

For more information on Unitrends and its enterprise-class data protection solutions for heterogeneous environments, see www.unitrends.com.

Archiving & Regulatory Retention, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, E-mail archiving, Messaging, Mimecast, Partnerships, Sendmail

Sendmail, Mimecast Partner for Hybrid-Cloud Email Security, Archiving, Management

Sendmail and Mimecast today announced a new strategic partnership that provides additional enhanced options for integrating and configuring email management solutions, which are needed to meet the growing hybrid-cloud email deployment requirements of large global enterprises.

This strategic partnership allows global enterprises to combine the proven on-premises Sentrion Email Integration Platform with Mimecast’s leading in-cloud Unified Email Management in a hybrid-cloud architecture for complete email security, archiving and business continuity with any on-premises or in-cloud email system.

“Gartner has long maintained that enterprises moving email to the cloud may have unique requirements that cannot be entirely fulfilled with cloud-only provisioning,” said Matt Cain, Vice President, Gartner Inc. “Large organizations therefore may require a flexible on-premises/cloud combination that can support a variety of unique email deployment options for mailboxes, security, archiving, routing and policy management.”

Many large organizations are looking to benefit from the cost, flexibility and other gains of cloud-based email deployments, but email-to-cloud migrations cannot be done without also managing the large number of machine-generating emails from business systems that rely on on-premises email infrastructure. Adding to the challenges for global enterprises are the wide range of security, regulatory compliance and corporate email policy requirements.

“Our customers have been asking for scalable cloud email applications that can easily integrate with our on-premises Sentrion Email Integration Platform with single provider support,” said Glen D. Vondrick, Sendmail President & CEO. “We are impressed by the proven Mimecast platform which offers the integration opportunity to deliver the hybrid-cloud architecture options enterprises need in order to consolidate multiple point products, reduce number of vendors, and further simplify the management of business email complexity.”

Sentrion is the de facto standard on-premises email infrastructure platform deployed by major Fortune 1000 enterprises around the globe to manage the complexity of policy-based routing and integration of machine-generated email with human collaboration email. Mimecast’s Unified Email Management platform is the only cloud-based email management solution designed specifically to deliver a broad range of email management capabilities in a tightly integrated, high performance SaaS platform. Mimecast in the cloud supports more than 6000 businesses worldwide.

“Sendmail’s proven success in providing on-premises email infrastructure to Fortune 1000 organizations makes them an ideal global enterprise partner for Mimecast,” said Peter Bauer, CEO, Mimecast. “Businesses are being driven toward evaluating and adopting cloud-based email solutions to control cost and complexity which can be quite challenging in high volume machine generated email environments. By combining Sentrion on-premises with Mimecast in the cloud, organizations can garner the advantages of the cloud while continuing to meet their business systems requirements. The option of a hybrid configuration means no matter what size of business and no matter how complex the requirements, we can enable the ideal email management solution.”

Sentrion Cloud Apps powered by Mimecast are available now from Sendmail. Those applications include: Mimecast Email Security, Mimecast Email Archiving and Mimecast Email Continuity. Deeper enterprise-specific integration between the two platforms is currently underway.