Posts Tagged ‘server backup’
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.
Expanded Sales and Technical Training
The new year is off to an excellent start at StorageCraft. We’re hiring new sales and support staff and we’re expanding our training to help you more. We’ll be revamping and revising things over the next few months, but starting this week we’re offering brand-new training sessions.
This Thursday, we’re beginning our weekly series offering in-depth technical product training for StorageCraft solutions. This week’s Webinar is: “Working with StorageCraft Support: The fastest path to resolution.” We will also offer our sales training introduction, “How to Win More Business with a Better Disaster Recovery Solution” on Wednesday. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll have addition technical and sales training sessions.
To learn more about upcoming Webinars or to sign up for a specific training event, please visit the StorageCraft Events Center. And if you have a suggestion for a specific type of training event that you’d like to have, please let us know.
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)
Success Story: Mann Made Group
If you’re a solution provider with customers in remote locations, you know what it’s like to deal with the special challenges associated with out-of-the-way places. In the middle of the night, in bad weather — sometimes even on a normal day — it’s hard to ensure business continuity for far-flung regions. But we have ways of making that problem a little easier to deal with.
Mann Made Group is a financial services firm that’s headquartered on the Isle of Man. They need to make sure their customers have access to financial information all the time. So they contracted with PC Mann, an IT services provider to help make sure that business is always running smoothly. PC Mann uses StorageCraft ShadowProtect to help power its business continuity offering for customers. This way, PC Mann can give Mann Made Group both on-site backup, for quick recovery in the event of a catastrophic hardware failure, or off-site backup, in case of a disaster like a fire or flood.
With ShadowProtect’s VirtualBoot technology PC Mann can get one of Mann Made Group’s servers backup and and running as a virtual machine in just a few minutes; 30 minutes for a full bare metal restore. From the press release announcing the relationship, here’s what Alan Hollingsworth, Managing Director and Founder of Mann Made Group, had to say:
“We are a services business and any loss of IT systems is damaging to our reputation and our clients. The solution from PC Mann is effectively belt and braces and gives us a business continuity strategy that goes much further than other small firms in our industry.”
For the last 18 months, PC Mann has helped a growing list of clients replace legacy tape with StorageCraft disk based disaster recovery solutions.
“The cost of a full second site or server replication system is still prohibitive for most small business,” explains Andy Heeney, Managing Director of PC Mann, “We choose to partner with StorageCraft as it allows us to remove the complexity of managing server images and virtualised recovery servers and allows us to provide a reliable and cost effective service that requires little on-site management expertise or expensive hardware.” PC Mann is experiencing growing demand for its business continuity services across the island. “Smaller organisations rely on IT to give them a competitive advantage and the loss of applications for just a few hours can lead to customers switching suppliers and long term damage. Solutions like StorageCraft pay for themselves in the equivalent of just a few hours of downtime.”
Powered by StorageCraft
Two of our partners announced they are working together with us on an offering that will make life a whole lot easier for MSPs. LabTech and Doyenz will be using StorageCraft ShadowProtect technology to power a new offering that allows server failover in the cloud. This makes it a whole lot easier for MSPs to monitor their systems with LabTech, backup their systems with ShadowProtect and failover to a virtual machine on-site or off-site in the Doyenz Shadowcloud.
Here’s more about this “Freemium” offering from the press release:
“MSPs need an efficient method of protecting their customers’ information and monitoring their systems to prevent problems before they happen,” said Curt James, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at StorageCraft. “This strategic relationship between LabTech, Doyenz and StorageCraft not only allows MSPs to keep tabs on servers and resolve issues before they become problems, it also allows them to backup and failover systems in the cloud, in case of a catastrophe that can’t be prevented.”
“By partnering with LabTech and StorageCraft, we are proud to offer the channel a truly innovative, end-to-end disaster recovery solution, previously only available to enterprise market,” said Eric Webster, VP of Sales and Marketing for Doyenz. “Managed Service Providers can now ensure complete business continuity and manage their clients remotely with LabTech—and make significant profit margins while doing so.”
“The formed partnerships with Doyenz and StorageCraft, and the newly developed Freemium offer is a huge benefit to our LabTech partners and the entire MSP industry,” said Matt Nachtrab, CEO of LabTech Software. “LabTech Software and its partnerships with other leading industry solution providers like Doyenz and StorageCraft is giving today’s MSPs the needed toolsets to help their IT businesses become more efficient, productive and profitable.”
This gives MSPs a lot of options for backup and disaster recovery. You can read the entire press release here.
In the Cloud
StorageCraft is hanging out at Cloud Expo this week. Not only are we a sponsor, but we’re also heading up a breakout session on backup, disaster recovery and system migration in the cloud. Basically, we’re showing off the many ways you can use ShadowProtect in the cloud. So if you’re at the Cloud Expo this week, be sure to swing by our booth or our presentation.
If you didn’t know that ShadowProtect plays well in the cloud, we can tell you that it’s the backup and disaster recovery solution of choice for a lot of providers — companies we’re happy to partner with. Did you know that Zenith Infotech’s BDR solution is powered by StorageCraft ShadowProtect? So is the BusinessContinuitySuite — part of our relationship with Symform. We’re also working with Doyenz as part of their Shadowcloud solution. We also partner with GCloud3 and many others.
You may have seen one of our presentations where we mention that our technology is on millions of systems around the world. This is why. So many other people trust StorageCraft solutions to help power their own offerings. It’s just another reason why you can rely on ShadowProtect to protect your systems and data.
Data Corruption in Backups
By: Scott Barnes, StorageCraft CTO
Corruption is of course a very scary word. It’s one that we hear very rarely at StorageCraft. When we have heard it, it has generally been related to hardware failure or other software failure. But when we created ShadowProtect, we have had several development rules that have prevented ShadowProtect images from suffering corruptions due to StorageCraft software.
- Backup Image Files can only be written to once. In other words, the image file is created, the backup data is written and then the image file is closed. The backup image file is never opened for write access again.
- Related to rule number one, any tool that must add data to an existing image must do it in an incremental file. For example, when mounting an image file for read-write access, all changes are stored in a separate file, the original image(s) is opened for read only access and a write buffer file is created to store all new writes.
- Only the backup data for a single volume is stored in a single file. For good or bad, our files represent only data for one volume. This is also related to rule 1. Each partition is backed up independently of each other and would require reopening an image file to add a different volume’s data.
When backups images are saved to a local drive, like an internal or USB drive, the file system is very, very good at detecting any type of write failures during a backup. If Windows did not do this, Windows would quickly cease to exist.
The possibility of corruption during a backup to local drive is very low. Have we seen it? Yes, Western Digital MyBooks don’t work well with HP machines. This was tested within and without StorageCraft and it is very repeatable. We don’t recommend the combination.
When saving backups to network shares, you are dependent on a few things, the transport and the file server. In a Windows environment network and server, we have seen very few corruption events. Windows again is very good at detecting failures. We have seen more in the NAS world. Not all NAS devices are equal. There are some very cheap NAS devices. If backups are important to you, I would avoid cheap storage. But if you do opt for the cheaper route, I would test it thoroughly with large files. There was one NAS that would only corrupt images that were between 2-4 GB, but not 5-6 GB, then again from 7-8 GB, but not from 9-10 GB. Test, test, test.
When saving to removable media such as DVD, we highly recommend you use good quality media and again, test, test, test. Cheap DVD media is cheap. Just because you’ve copied many DVD movies doesn’t mean it will work for data. Movies don’t care about corruption; they keep playing right through it. Backups do care.
If an image file is corrupt, it most likely will fail to restore. This depends a bit on where the corruption is in the file, but each part of the file is important and linked to one another so if there is corruption, ShadowProtect will probably fail to restore.
ShadowProtect mounting tools are not so picky. Even if an image is corrupt, in most cases it will mount and you should be able to retrieve some data from it. Even some of the volume recovery tools will work against a mounted volume. Corruption either happens during the backup or long after the backup. If the Backup image file verified once correctly, nothing that ShadowProtect does would corrupt that file after it has been created.
Corruption after the fact is caused by disk issues or software issues. Disk issues include sector rot and general drive failures. Most common software issues would include file system corruption where applications are allowed to write over the top of sectors that are in use, but part of an image file.
Verify run from the system that is to be restored usually picks up any corruption that could occur during the restore. A verify from another machine may not pick up issues related to corruption by the transport during restore. But we rarely see corruption issues. If we have, it has 99.99% of the time been related and traced to the hardware with events to backup the hardware failures.
It is a good idea to verify your image files from time to time. Generally, corruption issues don’t come and go. They are either already there and haven’t been exposed yet or they come and don’t leave.
Always check your event logs. Don’t let any disk related events go unexplained or un-fixed.
For additional information about solving issues with unverified ShadowProtect backup images, please visit the StorageCraft Knowledge Base.
Visit us as MSPWorld Conference & Expo
StorageCraft will be participating in the MSPWorld Conference and Expo next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at the Los Angeles Convention Center. If you’re planning to attend, please make sure you stop by and say hello. We’ll be talking about ShadowProtect 4, of course, because that’s what we do.
We’ll also be telling people about the new features that help businesses get back up and running even faster than ever. Can you recover a 1TB server in five minutes or less? We can! And we’ll show you how you can, too. Our booth is #853. Even if you’re already sold on ShadowProtect, we would love to hear from you.
To find out more visit the MSPWorld Conference and Expo Web site http://www.mspnews.com for all of the details.
Video: Business Continuity Suite
In the last few weeks we’ve told you a bit about our partnership with Symform. We’re working together on the Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform. Symform worked with Varvid Video to put together this short introduction to the Business Continuity Suite, which includes interviews with Brandon Nordquist, StorageCraft’s vice president of product management and one of its co-founders, Praerit Garg, Symform’s CEO and co-founder and Jamison West, CEO of JWCS, a managed service provider already using the Business Continuity Suite.
If you’d like to know more, visit www.businesscontinuitysuite.com
Disaster Recovery & Data Protection Planning
Over the next couple of months, StorageCraft will be taking part in some Interface 2010 events. Interface 2010 is a technology symposium for information technology managers that connects them with key IT influencers and technology vendors.
We are one of the vendors sponsoring the Interface event in Phoenix today. As part of today’s event, we’ll be holding a seminar on disaster recovery and data protection planning that will show IT managers how to maximize business continuity.
If you want to find out more about hard drive imaging and how the ShadowProtect award-winning line of disaster recovery, data protection and system migration technology can help keep your business going 24/7, you may want to visit us at Interface 2010 or one of the many upcoming technology trade shows we’ll be sponsoring and attending this fall. We’ll keep you posted on all the places where we will be over the next few weeks and months. If you have plans to attend any trade meetings from now through November, chances are we will be there.
For now, here are a few more Interface events coming up where we hope to see you:
Denver October 7
Salt Lake City October 21
Seattle November 17
To apply for registration at an Interface 2010 event, please visit: http://www.f2fevents.com/.
Business Continuity Suite Web Training
Today’s Business Continuity Suite Web training is underway, but there are still a couple of opportunities to sign up. These free, one-hour Webinars will show you how easy it is to offer your SMB customers simple, affordable cloud backup with the Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform. Next week, we’ll have two training session, on Tuesday and on Thursday, so you can learn how StorageCraft ShadowProtect and the Symform Cooperative Storage Cloud can make it easy for you provide cloud backup to your customers. In addition to easy implementation, the Business Continuity Suite is also very cost effective. Hard to believe? The free Web training will explain why it’s time to move your customers to the cloud.
Here are some benefits of the Business Continuity Suite:
* Rapid recovery
* Restore to bare metal, to dissimilar hardware or to and from virtual environments.
* Backup near-line and in the cloud
* Encryption of backup files using 256-bit military grade AES algorithm
* Redundant storage of secure files in multiple locations and around the world.
In addition to saving money, the Business Continuity Suite is also fast and extremely secure. You won’t have to worry about unwanted intruders stealing you or your customers’ data.
The upcoming online training events are Tuesday, September 14 and Thursday, September 16. Check out the Business Continuity Suite Web site to find out more, and to sign up for a Webinar.
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.
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.
StorageCraft Launches ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise
StorageCraft released a brand new product this morning, ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™ 4.0. ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is an add-on feature for ShadowProtect Server™ and ShadowProtect Small Business Server™. It has a few more features than the basic product, ShadowProtect ImageManager, which comes with all of the ShadowProtect™ products.
The revolutionary feature in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is HeadStart Restore™, which allows you to simultaneously restore your server backup images, while you’re still backing up your server.
“System restores often involve terabytes of data, which means a realistic RTO is hours,” said Scott Barnes, chief technology officer at StorageCraft. “With HeadStart Restore, we’ve drastically reduced the time it takes to recover your systems and data because most of the system and data recovery occurred before there was even a failure.”
With HeadStart Restore — or HSR — you set up a system restore “job” in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise to begin the server recovery right away.
ShadowProtect Server continues to back up any incremental changes that are made on the server, which also get sent to the HeadStart Restore job and applied. The Lag Time Apply feature in HSR also allows administrators to delay incremental changes – to account for corruption from malware or a virus. By default, this is set to three days, but this can be changed to suit IT requirements.
In the event of a disaster, the administrator finalizes the restore – which usually takes seconds to apply the incremental updates – then prepares the virtual environment, runs ShadowProtect’s Hardware Independent Restore™ technology, reboots the server, and is back up and running. The elapsed time is several minutes, not several hours. So you’re able to restore a server with even multi-terabytes of data in 15-20 minutes.
“Being able to get a jump on the restore process with HeadStart Restore is a tremendous asset for our business and for our customers,” said Shawn Massey, director of NetAssist at Camera Corner/Connecting Point Computer Center. “We’re able to get servers up and running in a fraction of the time it used to take. Downtime is expensive, and knowing that it won’t take all day or all weekend to rebuild a server is invaluable.”
You can find all kinds of additional information about StorageCraft ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise 4.0 on the ShadowProtect product pages, including data sheets and white papers. Or e-mail sales@storagecraft.com.
ShadowProtect Server 4.0 and ShadowProtect Small Business Server Available
StorageCraft released ShadowProtect Server™ 4.0 and ShadowProtect Small Business Server™ 4.0 this morning. There are some great new features in this new version that you will definitely want to check out.
In particular VirtualBoot™. With VirtualBoot, you can right click on any ShadowProtect™ image file and boot it as a virtual machine. 
This feature makes it very easy to test new software in your server environment or boot legacy systems for archival purposes.
“We could not be more excited about VirtualBoot and the other features that ShadowProtect 4.0 is bringing to the table,” said Sean Furman, president of STF Consulting. “The new functionality is truly game changing for us and we look forward to utilizing ShadowProtect 4.0 in our managed services offering.”
VirtualBoot uses Sun VirtualBox to boot the file into .VMDK or .VHD format.
Other features in ShadowProtect Server 4.0:
- Central management console,
- Virtual converter,
- ShadowProtect ImageManager™,
- Image verification and re-verification,
- Image consolidation,
- Resume on Interruption,
- Hardware Independent Restore™ (HIR),
- Bare metal recovery,
- Granular recovery of files and folders in moments.
Check out the ShadowProtect product pages for additional information, including data sheets, white papers and product tours.
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.
Eliminating Backup Windows – for Physical and Virtual Servers
The e-mail ad touted a “brand new solution” that solves the problem that’s overwhelmed IT teams for years — completing backup jobs in the short amount of time available, the “backup window.” The ad said the company had found a way to incorporate imaging technology to eliminate lengthy backup jobs.
The only problem is, this isn’t new, as ShadowProtect users can attest. Whether you’re backing up physical systems or virtual systems, ShadowProtect takes point-in-time snapshots of the server’s operating system and data. Then, while your server remains online, ShadowProtect creates a backup image of everything in your server environment.
The scheduler in ShadowProtect lets you specify how frequently you run your backup. For example, you can set it up to run a full backup every evening, and take incremental backup images throughout the day — even as frequently as every 15 minutes.
So while the problem of shorter backup windows may be an old one, the solution isn’t necessarily new. And even if you’re planning to migrate to virtual systems — something you can also accomplish with ShadowProtect — you don’t need to change your backup system just because you’re moving into the virtual world. You can do protect both physical and virtual systems with ShadowProtect.
Additional Competitive Upgrade Pricing Offer
StorageCraft is also offering competitive upgrade pricing forSymantec customers who decide to make the switch to ShadowProtect backup and disaster recovery software. The discount offer is for current users of Symantec Backup Exec, Live State Recovery and V2i Protector.
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.
We’ll be announcing more competitive upgrade discounts for additional products next week.
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.