Archive for the ‘StorageCraft product information’ Category

Looking for a way to have your cloud and still make money, too? We announced our new joint cloud backup venture today, the Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform. The news announcement highlights our partnership and how MSPs can use the Business Continuity Suite to backup their customers’ systems and data near-line and off-site — without it costing an arm and a leg.

In the next few weeks, Symform and StorageCraft will offer Web-based training courses so you can learn how the Business Continuity Suite works and how to set it up to get the most benefit for your customers. Basically, you use StorageCraft ShadowProtect technology to backup servers, desktops and laptops and then save the point-in-time backup images to the Symform Cooperative Storage Cloud.

The Business Continuity Suite will help you provide the following:

•    Get systems up and running quickly after a catastrophic failure.

•    Backup on-site and replicate to the cloud for flexible disaster recovery options.

•    Restore to bare metal, to dissimilar hardware or to and from virtual environments.

•    Multiple levels of encryption and military grade security of backup files to prevent intrusion.

•    Schedule full and incremental backups to be saved automatically on-site and in the cloud.

•    Contribute excess storage and get valuable cloud storage in return.

•    Rapid recovery of files, folders or your entire system should a disaster occur.

You can learn more about the Business Continuity Suite at www.businesscontinuitysuite.com, where you’ll find white papers, data sheets, an analyst’s report and more. Or sign up for the free, one-hour classes which will show you how you can offer simple, affordable cloud backup to your customers.

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 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.

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.

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.

You may not know about it, but ShadowProtect comes with a handy utility called ShadowProtect ImageManager™. It comes with most versions of ShadowProtect, except ShadowProtect IT Edition™ and ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange™.

ShadowProtect ImageManager works with servers and with desktops and has several cool features that can really help you manage your backup image files. If you’re taking several backups each day, as you should, these backup image files can start eating up your disk space pretty fast, unless you have a way to manage them.

That’s why ShadowProtect ImageManager allows you to automatically consolidate point-in-time backup image files. Once you set it up, it can collapse all your daily images into one “daily” file. Then, each week it can collapse those “daily” files into one “weekly” file. And then it will collapse those “weekly” files into a “monthly” file. This helps minimize disk space. This is why we recommend that you set your ShadowProtect backups to perform “continuous incrementals.” Then it’s easy for ShadowProtect ImageManager to help you save disk space and collapse those incremental files each day, week and month.

In addition, ShadowProtect ImageManager will verify and re-verify your backup images. This way you can be certain all of your backups are in a good state, just in case you need them to recover your system.

Finally, you can also set up ShadowProtect ImageManager to track the status of your backups and notify you in the event of a backup job success — or failure. Now you can know right away if something goes wrong.

Earlier this year, StorageCraft also introduced a new version of ShadowProtect ImageManager, called ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™. It’s designed specifically for servers and has two additional features – HeadStart Restore™ and image verification. In our next blog article, we’ll spend some time explaining those features and its additional per-server licensing requirements.

A new version of StorageCraft ShadowProtect is available: ShadowProtect 4.0.1. It has several feature enhancements, including improvements to VirtualBoot™, an improved Recovery Wizard in the StorageCraft Recovery Environment and updated help links. There’s a lot more detail about the new things in ShadowProtect 4.0.1 in the ReadMe file, which you can check out online.

You can download a 30-day trial version of ShadowProtect Server, ShadowProtect Small Business Server or ShadowProtect Desktop from the ShadowProtect software trials Web page. You may also update your existing version of ShadowProtect from the ShadowProtect software updates page.

As always, if you need more information about a specific ShadowProtect product, you may visit one of the following product pages:

ShadowProtect Server™ – http://www.storagecraft.com/ShadowProtectServer

ShadowProtect Small Business Server™ – http://www.storagecraft.com/ShadowProtectSBS

ShadowProtect Desktop™ – http://www.storagecraft.com/ShadowProtectDesktop

ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™ – http://www.storagecraft.com/ShadowProtectIME

If you’ve ever thought about setting up a network at home or even been so ambitious as to set up a small office network, you know that it isn’t simple or straight forward. Getting everything  running smoothly requires time, patience and several bottles of aspirin.

PC Magazine recently put together a how-to guide giving you some tips and tricks to make the process a little smoother. This guide explains the kind of storage to get and how to protect it.

You can set up your own local backup system given enough external storage space. If you’re going to take this course, we recommend creating not just a backup, but a whole drive image – —that is, a backup of not just your data, but your entire PC— – everything from your files to all the tweaks you make to your OS and apps so that they perform the way you want them to. The best software for this, hands down, is ShadowProtect Desktop 4.0.

Check out the entire article and pick up a few pointers. You may even have some of your own that the article doesn’t highlight. You can always share them here and give others the benefit of your wisdom and experience.

Maximizing business continuity while protecting critical data can be especially challenging for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). Most data protection systems are designed for large enterprise environments, which do not work for SMBs. For smaller businesses, resources are especially limited, and administrators cannot afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for expensive continuous data protection (CDP) solutions. But having a server out of commission isn’t an option either.

In addition, many data protection solutions overlook the critical component of the recovery time objective (RTO). Your RTO is the maximum amount of time your systems can be out of commission – from when a disruption occurs to the moment your system is available again. Minimizing your RTO helps you avoid the consequences of a long-term break in business continuity.

Unfortunately, most backup and recovery strategies are bound by technological limitations. When your server has many terabytes (TB) of data that must be recovered – not to mention the operating system and applications – it takes many hours to restore everything from the original volume, even at relatively rapid disk speeds.

Cloud computing and off-site replication can help address concerns about data security and help ensure that information is available following a catastrophe. But again, these types of security solutions are often unavailable to SMBs due to their complexity and their costs.

Plus, IT administrators working for SMBs rarely have the time or the resources to managecomplex backup systems that require extensive certifications or hours of training to understand. But having a clear picture of your backup resources, knowing whether backups are successful and minimizing the resources required for ongoing data protection are imperative.

Download this white paper to learn more about each of these issues, why they are important for SMBs to address and how to resolve them while maximizing business continuity, protecting critical data and minimizing IT resources necessary to accomplish the demands of maintaining Windows servers.

Maximizing business continuity while minimizing business disruption can be especially challenging for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) following a server failure. Resources are limited, so there isn’t a lot of help to get systems back online. Having a server out of commission is never pleasant, but the consequences of business disruption are grimmer for SMBs than they are for large enterprises that can disperse the effect of a server meltdown.

That’s why it is vitally important to keep your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) at a level that helps you avoid the serious consequences of a break in the flow of your daily business. Your RTO is the maximum amount of time your systems can be out of commission – from when a disruption occurs to the moment your system is available again. Minimizing your RTO helps you avoid the consequences of a long-term break in business continuity.

Unfortunately, most backup and recovery strategies are bound by technological limitations. When your server has many terabytes (TB) of data that must be recovered – not to mention the operating system and applications – it takes many hours to restore everything from the original volume, even at relatively rapid disk speeds.

In addition, the promise of virtualization may seem attractive for SMBs, particularly since virtualization can help address limitations on resources.  But the reality of the cost and time expenditures to transfer data to virtual servers, in addition to the complexity of virtualization technology, makes this prohibitive.

Finally, upgrading to a new Windows server can frustrate IT staff with its complexity and potential for disaster. The migration process can place a heavy load on SMBs with limited IT resources.

Download this white paper to learn more about each of these issues, why they are important for SMBs to address and how to resolve them while maximizing business continuity and minimizing IT resources necessary to accomplish the demands of maintaining Windows servers.