Posts Tagged ‘backup’
StorageCraft Partners With Highly Reliable Systems: New End-to-End Backup Solution
Alliance delivers best-in-class backup and disaster recovery solutions
DRAPER, Utah, U.S.A., – Nov. 8, 2011 – StorageCraft Technology Corporation, a provider of best-in-class backup, disaster recovery, system migration and data protection solutions for servers, desktops and laptops, and Highly Reliable Systems, a manufacturer of backup and disaster recovery systems, have partnered to provide a complete end-to-end backup and disaster recovery solution for the SMB market.
“The ideal backup and disaster recovery infrastructure demands both innovative software and reliable storage devices. This alliance with Highly Reliable Systems gives small and medium businesses the ability to create an environment that ensures fast, flexible and reliable recovery and restoration of its data, at a price point that makes sense,” said Curt James, vice president of marketing and business development at StorageCraft.
StorageCraft and Highly Reliable Systems share the goal of making it profitable for value-added resellers (VARs) and managed service providers (MSPs) to deliver backup, disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. Highly Reliable Systems manufactures quality, hot pluggable, disk-based backup and storage systems designed with easy off-site capabilities with removable drives. StorageCraft® ShadowProtect® provides best-in-class backup and recovery software, and coupled with Highly Reliable Systems backup devices, it creates a simple, affordable backup and disaster recovery solution for SMBs.
Highly Reliable Systems’ hardware platform works seamlessly with the entire StorageCraft product line to combine backup procedures that are easy to manage with the ability to move backup images off-site with removable drives. Customers can also leverage the solution to replicate their backup data to a remote data center of their choice for added redundancy and protection against catastrophic disasters.
“We found a natural partnership early on with StorageCraft. As a leading U.S. manufacturer of storage optimized for backup, we found a real value in being able to refer resellers to a quality product. When you pair our devices with their software, you have a reliable disaster recovery solution capable of backing up over 400GB per hour and restoring in just a few minutes,” said Jeff Bowling, vice president of business development for Highly Reliable Systems.
About StorageCraft Technology Corporation
StorageCraft Technology Corporation provides best-in-class backup, disaster recovery, system migration and data protection solutions for servers, desktops and laptops. StorageCraft delivers software products that reduce downtime, improve security and stability for systems and data and lower the total cost of ownership for servers, desktops and laptops. For more information, visit www.storagecraft.com.
About Highly Reliable Systems
Highly Reliable Systems, Inc. is a US manufacturer of backup and disaster recovery hardware solutions based in Reno, NV. Highly Reliable Systems specializes in engineering backup and recovery devices that use fully enclosed, protected and hot swappable hard drives, which allow for extremely fast backup and restore and also provide an easy way to physically transport data and backup images offsite.
www.high-rely.com
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StorageCraft and ShadowProtect are trademarks of StorageCraft Technology Corporation. Other company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
New ShadowProtect Virtual Pack
When we announced ShadowProtect Virtual last week, a lot of you told us you loved the new pricing and licensing options, but something was missing: a server 3-pack license. We kicked the idea around a bit, discussed why we should (or shouldn’t) do it, and then came to a decision. We’re adding a server 3-pack license.
It’s going to take us a couple of days to add SKUs and make sure all of our ducks are in a row, but by week’s end, we hope to have the server 3-pack available on our own Web store and through Lifeboat distribution (in North America). We want you to be able to standardize all of your servers with one backup and disaster recovery solution.
This also gives us a chance to say that we really do value your feedback, and we do listen to what you have to say. We hope you’ll continue to let us know where we can improve our products and our programs. We would like to say “Thank you” to those of you who did take the time to share your opinion and add your two cents. We’ll keep on listening.
MSP University Boot Camps
We’re lacing up our training boots and hitting the road this year for MSP University Boot Camps across the United States. We’re not exactly the drill sergeant in this analogy, but we are offering some great training sessions for managed service providers (MSPs). We’re working with one of our strategic partners, eFolder, to provide MSPs with great information on how they can offer disaster recovery and cloud backup services to their customers.
You can learn more about it in the press release: http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20110202007068/en/StorageCraft-Sponsors-MSP-University-Boot-Camps.
Recorded Training Sessions
If you missed out on our recent technical and sales training sessions, it isn’t too late to catch these Webinars. We’ve recorded them so that you can watch them when you have a little spare time.
To watch our deep-dive technical training, “Unravel the mysteries of ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise,” visit: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/498164689.
To watch our sales training Webinar, “How to win more business with a better Disaster Recovery solution,” visit: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/633511585.
Both Webinars are free, but you’ll need to enter your e-mail address to view them.
Sales Training: Winning More Business with a Better DR Solution
It may seem like rocket science, but it isn’t hard to protect your customers’ critical data and make a profit for your business. You just need the tools in order to do it. The first is a great disaster recovery (DR) solution. The second tool is a training event to show you how to sell it. Well, done and done.
StorageCraft is offering a FREE sales training Webinar next Wednesday to show you how to win more business with a better DR solution: StorageCraft ShadowProtect. This event will show you why it’s critical for you to have a simple, RELIABLE backup and DR solution to offer your customers and how to sell it to them.
Register for this complimentary Webinar right away, because space is limited.
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/618569697
Winning More Business with a Better DR Solution
Wednesday, December 8
12:00 – 1:00 p.m. MST (2:00 EST, 1:00 CST, 11:00 PST)
On the Road Again
In North America, the leaves are changing color, the days are getting shorter, there’s a decided nip in the air, and we’re headed out to another trade show. It must be autumn. The next few weeks we’ll be busy meeting many of you at upcoming tech events across the U.S. and Canada.
This weekend, we’ll are in Las Vegas for one of our favorite trade shows – SMB Nation. Harry Brelsford always brings together a fantastic group of the industry’s best. We’re holding several different break-out meetings, including a technical deep dive of ShadowProtect ImageManage Enterprise, as well as co-branded seminars with two of our cloud computing partners: Symform and Doyenz.
If you’re still getting your feet wet in the cloud, so to speak, you may want to attend both sessions. They may give you some ideas on how to handle your cloud backups. Fortunately, ShadowProtect plays very well in the cloud, so you can use it to save your backups in the cloud no matter which solution you choose.
Next week, we’ll be heading north to Calgary, sponsoring ChannelNext in Alberta, Canada. We’ve been partnering with ChannelNext and TechnoPlanet Productions to tell Canadian solution providers about ShadowProtect. ChannelNext is October 25 in Calgary.
In early November, we’ll be sponsoring Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara, California. This will be our first time there. As I mentioned, ShadowProtect really plays well in the cloud, so we think this will be a great opportunity for StorageCraft. Cloud Computing Expo is November 1-4.
In mid-November, we’ll be back in Las Vegas where we’re participating in another Everything Channel XChange event. This year, XChange Tech Innovators is November 10-12.
We hope your fall is a little more relaxed than ours, but we’re definitely not complaining! It’s good to be busy and it’s great to tell people about ShadowProtect.
Analyst’s view of the Business Continuity Suite
StorageCraft and Symform zoom into online disaster recovery and business continuity
Partnership between software vendors for MSP storage services
By Deni Connor
Senior Analyst
Storage Strategies NOW
September 2010
Data protection and recovery software developer StorageCraft and cloud services provider Symform moved into the world of cloud-based disaster recovery and business continuity with a recent partnership in which Symform will be a platform for protecting StorageCraft ShadowProtect images.
The Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform allows Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to offer their customers backup and disaster recovery as a cloud-based storage offering. Using ShadowProtect™ technology, MSPs save backup images onsite and offsite, via the Symform Cooperative Storage Cloud™ to enable near-line and cloud-based disaster recovery.
Simply, the Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform allows ShadowProtect image-level backups to be securely distributed across other small and mid-sized businesses and among its IT service providers in a cooperative and shared storage fashion in order to protect it and ensure its recoverability.
StorageCraft and Symform are among the first vendors to craft such a deal, which provides their MSP partners and their SMB customers with an affordable and easily implemented means of disaster recovery.
Market background
In the SMB market, although 50% of businesses have a local backup strategy, they often do not have an affordable and efficient means of moving data offsite for protection in the event of a disaster. They may shuttle tapes offsite or they may use an online backup service such as EMC MozyPro or Carbonite, whose pricing is based on a capacity of storage stored. An SMB will soon find that these methods for protecting data and providing business continuity are too error-prone, cumbersome to administer and time-consuming means to recover data quickly. And, they are expensive – online backup services can cost almost $400 a month to protect even just one file server.
Enter the Business Continuity Suite
StorageCraft has partnered with Symform to use its distributed storage system across small and mid-sized businesses and their IT storage service providers. Here’s how the Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform works.
StorageCraft ShadowProtect Server™, ShadowProtect Small Business Server™ or ShadowProtect Desktop™ creates an encrypted, image-based backup of a designated system. This series of differential and incremental point-in-time backup image files are then stored in locally hosted folders. The Symform Node software, which is installed on one computer in the customer’s network, is pointed at these local folders, where it monitors them for file adds or changes. It then automatically mirrors the adds and changes made to local storage to the cloud, where it creates a duplicate file structure.
Each StorageCraft image file is reduced to a series of 64MB blocks, which are then encrypted using AES-256 encryption algorithms. These 64MB blocks are then shredded locally into 1MB fragments. Using an erasure encoding algorithm called Reed-Solomon, 32 parity fragments are added to every 64, resulting in 96 fragments. Dubbed RAID-96™ by Symform, any 64 of the 96 segments can recreate the original block, thereby guaranteeing recoverability and high-availability.
All 96 fragments are distributed using a random statistical model to 96 participating Nodes in the Symform Cooperative Storage Cloud. An application called Symform Cloud Control™, which runs at Amazon Cloud Services (EC2) acts as a traffic controller, tells the local machine where to place each of the fragments.
When the Symform Node is configured, the end-user or MSP determines how much local disk space it plans to contribute to the cloud. This can be disk space at a local office or that of a MSP. An SMB or its MSP simply needs to contribute as much disk space as the disk space they want to consume with StorageCraft image-level backups.
Channel impact
The Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform is a completely channel-focused program, with pricing determined by StorageCraft and Symform MSPs. It makes disaster recovery practical for SMBs and at much less cost – approximately $50 per month per protected server.
The solution lets MSPs provide disaster recovery and business continuity services without a huge outlay for business continuity infrastructure. By simply donating disk space to the Symform Cooperative Storage Cloud, the MSP can reap the advantages of acting as a storage services provider (SSP).
SSG-NOW Assessment
StorageCraft’s and Symform’s approach to cloud-based business continuity is a shoo-in for the small and mid-sized business, which is faced with expensive and often unreliable solutions for cloud enablement. The MSP focus of this announcement is close to perfect for the SMB who does business with a particular MSP because of the customer’s inability or disinclination to provide IT resources and because of its relative inexperience with technology. The Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform is priced right for the MSP market – at $50 per protected server, it provides an affordable, easy for the MSP to implement alternative to other inefficient cloud-based backup and recovery solutions on the market.
Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform
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.
ShadowProtect Desktop is available
StorageCraft is releasing ShadowProtect Desktop 4.0 today. Like ShadowProtect Server, it includes some of the same cool features in that are in ShadowProtect Server 4.0, such as VirtualBoot™ and backup verification and re-verification.
It’s also very easy to test drive it with the free 30-day trial version. The trial has all of the features of the full version, except for the recovery environment, which isn’t quite as restrictive as that may sound. For example, you can recover individual files and folders from backup images with the trial version, using the Explore Backup wizard and you can recover data volumes on your system, as well. You just can’t restore your system (primary) volume because you don’t have the bootable recovery CD.
So go ahead and test drive ShadowProtect Desktop 4.0. We have the trial up on our Web site, or you can download it from sites like PC World. Try it, you’ll like it enough to buy it.
Reliable Recovery
StorageCraft is featured in the March 12 edition of Processor in an article titled Reliable Recovery. StorageCraft VP of Product Management Brandon Nordquist discusses the company’s growth, even in a difficult economy, as well as the need for quick and reliable disaster recovery.
StorageCraft intends to continue its program of product expansion in the year ahead. One area that Nordquist has identified as having growth potential is virtualization, a key area for many software developers. Another major effort will be to increase the speed of recovery in all of its ShadowProtect applications.
“When you’re really in a crunch—when servers are down or the CEO’s laptop is not working—that’s when you need to do a very fast restore,” he says, noting that the key difficulty IT administrators have is keeping up with the daily accumulation of work data that then has to be restored in the event of a failure.
Nordquist also discusses StorageCraft’s business model, product line and some future plans in the article.
2010 Storage Trend – Moving from Tape to Disk
Every year the storage analysts try to predict what the big trends will be for the coming year. They base their analysis on polling data and other research. Many of them are specific and others are more general. Enterprise Strategy Group’s 2010 list has some trends that are right up our alley. Here is one highlight:
#1. The shift from tape to disk: the modernization of backup continues.
From our perspective, that’s something everyone should have done years ago. But there are a lot of businesses that are still using tape for all of their backup. If you’ve already made the switch, you know that tape has problems from start to finish. Not only is it slow in recording the backup, it’s slow in restoring from the backup — that is, if you’re even able to use the backup. Disk is cheaper, faster and very reliable. Plus you can verify your disk-based backup quickly and easily with many MD5 verification tools. In the event of a disaster, recovering from a disk-based backup will not cause you hours and hours of frustration.
If you decide to keep your tape backups, we have a betamax, some 8-track tapes and a phone answering machine we’d like to sell you, too.
Other trends highlighted in the ESG report include the changing role of virtualization, cloud-based backup and the changing attitude toward backing up enterprise desktops and laptops. Check out the entire ESG list for yourself and see if you’ll be facing any of these issues for the year.
StorageCraft ShadowProtect in PC World
StorageCraft ShadowProtect is mentioned in a success story in PC World about virtualizing blade servers. PC Troubleshooters in Rhode Island is using ShadowProtect Server as part of its backup and disaster recovery solution to protect the systems and data on the servers in their data center.
We created our own backup and disaster recovery system by deploying a network-attached storage device onsite and using StorageCraft ShadowProtect software to image servers on an hourly basis. Each image is encrypted and sent to two separate storage facilities in Maryland and Colorado.
Check out this case study and find out how you might be able to use StorageCraft ShadowProtect as part of your backup and disaster recovery offering, whether you’re protecting physical servers, virtual servers, or both.
Corporate World Is Getting the “Backup” Message
It looks like the corporate world may finally be getting the message: backup is important. A new IDC report says that more than half (53%) of all corporations they surveyed have deployed centralized backup software to protect company PCs. That’s a big increase over previous surveys. The report also shows that about a third of companies (32.5%) are still relying on individual employees to backup their own computers.
The report also found that the larger the company, the more likely it is to have centralized PC backup. Plus, it isn’t just regulatory worries about backing up company data that have corporations worried. They’re also concerned about the possibility of hardware failure.
Competitive Upgrade Pricing
StorageCraft is offering competitive upgrade pricing for Computer Associates customers who decide to make the switch to ShadowProtect backup and disaster recovery software. The discount offer is for current users of CA ARCserve Backup or Disk Backup and Restore.
To get the competitive upgrade discount pricing — which is 35% off list price — customers have to show proof of license, like a copy of their license certificate, a copy of their receipt or an e-mail confirmation of a software download. Send an e-mail to discounts@storagecraft.com or send a fax to +1 801 545-4705 along with your proof of purchase. (You can mail in your product CD as a proof of purchase, too.) The offer is available in North America and South America only through March 15, 2010.
Disaster Recovery in a Virtual World
Virtualization can bring a lot of business benefits – lower cost and greater flexibility, in particular. But it can also pose some problems. In particular, how easy or difficult is it to protect virtualized systems and data?
That’s where the award-winning ShadowProtect line of disk-based backup and disaster recovery software can help. ShadowProtect Desktop, ShadowProtect Server, ShadowProtect Small Business Server and ShadowProtect IT Edition are all compatible with virtual systems – such as VMware or Microsoft Virtual Server.
Not only does ShadowProtect provide Hardware Independent Restore (H.I.R.), it can also convert physical machines to virtual machines (P2V), virtual to virtual (V2V) and virtual to physical.
If you’re trying to find out how to use ShadowProtect with your virtual machines, we have a lot of information in the StorageCraft Support Center. There you’ll find all kinds of tools to help you protect your virtual world. For example, we have a guide that will take you through the process of restoring a virtual machine. There are also articles that show you how to perform H.I.R. or how to use VMware Server or VMware Converter as disaster recovery.
To find out more, visit the StorageCraft Web site and type “virtual” into the search box.
Business Continuity
It’s called “disaster recovery” because it can help you get access to your systems and data following catastrophes of all kinds. But DR can also keep your business going following those everyday mishaps – something as simple as accidentally deleting a critical file or as complex as seeing your RAID server crash. Having a way to keep your business going in the event of a minor accident should be part of your overall disaster recovery plan.
That’s where StorageCraft solutions can help. The ShadowProtect line of award-winning backup and disaster recovery software for Windows systems and data helps you have a worry-free computing environment. Once you install ShadowProtect and create backup schedules on your servers and desktops, you have a copy of everything, in case you ever need it. With incremental (or delta) backups that you can take every 15 minutes, you can even ensure you have copies of minor changes you make throughout the day. Just need a specific file? You right click on the backup image file from your last backup, mount it as the next available drive letter, then simply navigate to the folder with the missing file. Now you just copy it – or drag and drop it to where you want it.
Disaster recovery software can make the difference between something being just a minor hiccup in a busy day, or a major problem that brings business to a screeching halt. Find out more about ShadowProtect solutions and see if they can help your business continuity.
Warning: McAfee’s Most Dangerous Domains Announced
Who’s Handling Your Backup?
Is your data backed up?
It may seem like a ridiculous idea. Of course all of your data has a backup, right? Think again. This tale of IT woe shows that it can happen at any small business.
A question often asked is, “how could anyone be so stupid as to not back up data?” Reflecting on my own experience, I see how it could happen. Sometimes a series of events can interfere with important and seemingly basic IT tasks, such as backups.
Maybe that’s the first question for solution providers to ask a small business owner. And if they do have a backup in place, will it work when they need it? Just having a backup doesn’t mean that it will be effective when called upon. Here are some more questions to ask SMBs about their backup system:
- What would it cost you if a server failed – not just in terms of hardware and software, but in terms of productivity?
- What is your Recovery Time Objective (RTO)? Can you afford lengthy downtime while you spend days trying to restore your server?
- How reliable is your current backup/disaster recovery solution? Have you ever tried to restore a server, desktop and laptop?
- How long did it take to restore? Do you know how quickly you could be up and running again if a server, desktop or laptop no longer worked? Would it take you days or even weeks to have access to your data?
- Would you have access to the data even if the server could not be salvaged? Would you be able to restore your systems and data to new hardware or virtual hardware?
The solution, of course, is something you can offer them, as potential customers. By using the StorageCraft Managed Service Provider (MSP) licensing model you can provide ShadowProtect backup and disaster recovery software on a monthly subscription basis to your customers. You can do this without any up-front costs because you will only be charged – each month – for the licensing you are currently using, for the licenses you’ve already sold. If a customer orders 10 server licenses and then only uses eight, you will only be charged for the eight they use, and only during the months they use them.
We have tons of information about selling backup and disaster recovery as a service to your customers. Check here first to learn more about the StorageCraft MSP Partner program.