Posts Tagged ‘server backup’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s one week into the new year and how many resolutions have you kept so far? Here’s an easy one to make and keep: resolve that you’ll absolutely, positively back up every desktop and laptop you manage. As we’ve mentioned before, analysts say a startling number of PCs aren’t getting backed up — even when they’re connected to a network.

If you just received a brand new PC during the holidays, maybe you bought a laptop for yourself at an after-Christmas sale, or maybe you just installed Windows 7 on several hundred desktops that you manage –whatever the situation, now is the time to get organized and protect those systems.

Running ShadowProtect Desktop as your backup will make that incredibly easy. You can schedule it to backup the entire system and all of the data to a handy removable drive, or save your backup image files over a network. It’s very easy to set and forget, until you need to restore. Then you’ll be thanking your foresight (or management skills) for taking the time to have a simple disaster recovery plan in place.

And ShadowProtect Desktop fully supports Windows 7, starting with version 3.5x. You can download a free trial of ShadowProtect Desktop from the StorageCraft Web site and see for yourself how easy it is to use. What better way to protect your time and investment in a new operating system and/or new PC than to have a reliable backup? That’s one resolution that’s easy to keep.

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.