Archive for August 2010
Intel and McAfee: A marriage made in cloud heaven?
The channel is buzzing on today’s news that Intel is acquiring McAfee, the security technology firm, for nearly $8 billion. The VAR Guy says this new union should cause a little fear and trembling in Redmond and Mountain View as it is signaling that Intel doesn’t trust Microsoft and Symantec to keep IT secure as everything moves to the cloud. So will this be a marriage made in cloud heaven? Will Intel, by acquiring McAfee, keep business data safe and secure, no matter where it’s housed?
It will be many months before we have answers to these questions, but it’s still fun to ask them. In the mean time, this could create great opportunities for channel partners with an eye on the future who are looking for serious security alternatives. If Intel can successfully merge the companies and the technologies, it will create an opening for solution providers who want to deliver solid security embedded in hardware, and low margins. It may be a leap forward for business continuity moving into the cloud era.
No one is saying Intel’s relationship with Microsoft is over. But they’ll certainly be depending on their own brand for security solutions in the future. Channel partners will want to be asking these same questions as they set disaster recovery planning and future business migration to the cloud.
Setting Up Your Server Backup
We get a lot of requests for best practices and recommendations for ways to set up your server environment. ShadowProtect makes it pretty easy to backup everything on your Windows servers, but there are ways to set things up so that you’re maximizing your resources and your business continuity.
So one of our technical engineers has put together a great guide that outlines some ways to configure your servers and keep them up and running. It involves backing up each Windows server with ShadowProtect Server (or ShadowProtect Small Business Server) and running ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise on your critical servers so they’re backed up onsite and offsite. This way, when there’s a business disruption — from a server crash to a category 5 hurricane — you can restore your servers, recover your data, and get your business running again.
These scenarios involve our new VirtualBoot technology, that allows you to boot a ShadowProtect backup image file into a virtual machine in a matter of a few short minutes, as well as HeadStart Restore, which allows you to restore your backups before they’re needed. You can find out more about ShadowProtect by visiting the product pages, or you’re always welcome to contact us with your questions.
ShadowProtect Server Scenario Guide
ShadowProtect Server and ShadowProtect Small Business Server have a lot of uses beyond backup and disaster recovery. You may not even know all of the ways that ShadowProtect Server can help you protect your valuable business data. That’s why we’ve put together a scenario guide that shows several different ways you can use ShadowProtect Server for various problems.
For example, if you thought ShadowProtect Server was just a tool to help you perform server backup or bare metal recovery, you will be pleasantly surprised. Some of the other use cases include server migration, granular recovery of files and folders, disaster recovery testing and planning, backup verification and backup management.
The scenario guide is posted on our Web site as a PDF. Download it to find out all of the ways that the latest version in the award-winning ShadowProtect line of backup, disaster recovery and migration software can help you protect your data.
Choosing a Backup Solution Provider
For small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), finding the right value added reseller (VAR) can make the difference in making your business run smoothly. Smaller businesses just don’t have the resources or the personnel to make all of the IT decisions on their own. It’s important to find a channel partner who can do (or already has done) the research for you and help you make decision about the technology that will work best in your business.
So how do you begin choosing a VAR for your business? Tech Target has a great article about the steps you need to take before you make any decisions. They also talked to Greg Schulz, an analyst at Storage IO, who gave some great advice when you seek out a reseller.
“Interview them!” urged Schulz. “That is what you need to do to begin to understand their capabilities. If you were going to hire someone to be on your staff to do design optimization and improve backup you would do the same thing.” Furthermore, he advised SMBs to try to meet some of the people who would be involved in delivering services. “The more you plan to rely on a VAR, the more you should want to know them and their people. Their skill sets and ability to provide knowledge transfer are key,” he said.
The article lists some specific questions to ask as you make your evaluation. In particular, you’ll want to find out what kind of backup software they recommend and if that solution is specifically designed with SMBs in mind.
ShadowProtect Server Review in Redmondmag.com
Redmond Magazine just posted a review roundup of several backup and disaster recovery products for servers. The review spotlights four products designed especially for SMBs, including StorageCraft ShadowProtect Server™. The reviewer gave ShadowProtect high marks, and pointed out several great features.
Backups in SP are image-based, using the underlying VSS technology in Windows Server and providing very fast backups after the first full backup, as only changed sectors are backed up.
SP is a comprehensive product, offering efficient backups and smoothly blending the physical and virtual worlds for easy disaster recovery.
Check out the full review online and see why ShadowProtect is a great choice, especially if maximizing business continuity is really important for your company.
Recover Faster
In the last article, we focused on the features in ShadowProtect ImageManager™ and how they can help you manage your backup image files. In April, StorageCraft released an enhanced version of the product called ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™. It has all of the features in the standard version: consolidation of backup image files, file verification as well as notification settings.
But ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise also includes two additional features that make it much easier to improve business continuity and lower your recovery time objective (RTO), the maximum amount of time your server systems can be out of commission. These features are HeadStart Restore™ and replication.
HeadStart Restore – or HSR – allows you to begin the server recovery process right away, before a disaster. Whether it’s a natural disaster that took you out or a RAID router meltdown, it doesn’t really matter. You have to get access to your data as quickly as possible and you have to get your business running again.
First, you need to set up ShadowProtect Server (or ShadowProtect Small Business Server) to take regular backups of your data, then ShadowProtect will take snapshots of a point in time on your server. You can even set the scheduler in ShadowProtect to take incremental backups – just the deltas or small changes to your server – throughout the day.
The next thing you do is set ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise to create a restore job for a specific server. Once you’ve set up that job, ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise updates that restore job with the incremental changes that are made, so your restore job has all of the data updates that were made throughout the day. Here’s the really cool part: when a catastrophe strikes, you won’t have to wait hours and hours (or days and days) to get that server online again, because HSR has already been restoring the server. Recovery starts and is ongoing as your backups continue.
To get the server online, it will take just a few more steps. First, you finalize your restore job, which takes just a few seconds. Now you need to get it ready to restore into a virtual machine so you run ShadowProtect’s Hardware Independent Restore™ technology. Now you just reboot your server, and you’re up and running again. This process takes 15-20 minutes, even if you have a multi-TB volume of data.
The other key feature in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is replication. Now you can send your backup images to an off-site location so that your backups are secure in case your primary location is wiped out by flood, fire or another sort of catastrophe.
You’ll want to note that ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is licensed per server. So one license allows you to perform one HeadStart Restore job, one on-site replication and one off-site replication.
You can find out more by visiting the ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise product page. Included there is a product overview which explains just what it is and how it works.