Archive for the ‘Backup and Recovery’ Category
Posted by brennels on July 26, 2010
By: Chris Preimesberger http://www.eweek.com 2010-07-21
“The Cloud BUR [Back Up and Restore] SIG is a project of SNIA’s Cloud Storage Initiative that promotes the adoption of cloud storage as a delivery model that provides on-demand storage billed only for what is used.
Nobody doubts that there is a lot more education to do in all business markets about the intricacies and attributes of cloud data backup/restore, archiving and disaster recovery.
So an influential industry group, the Storage Networking Industry Association, took it upon itself July 21 to form a new Cloud Backup and Restore Special Interest Group to approach this problem.
The Cloud BUR [Back Up and Restore] SIG is a project of SNIA’s Cloud Storage Initiative that promotes the adoption of cloud storage as a model that provides on-demand storage billed only for what is used. Its main role is to educate the market about Cloud BUR benefits through use cases and to define requirements for future standards.”
Read the rest of the article here on eweek.com
Posted in Backup and Recovery, Cloud Backup, Cloud Recovery, Server Recovery | Tagged: cloud backup and recovery, cloud backup industry standards, Cloud Recovery | Leave a Comment »
Posted by amcanty on April 14, 2010
SOUTHBOROUGH, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Do you want the ability to backup and recover your data in the cloud? If you answered yes, then you won’t want to miss Double-Take® Software (NASDAQ: DBTK) and Amazon Web Services’ upcoming webinar on cloud recovery, which will provide information and answer questions about a new solution that is changing the disaster recovery landscape by eliminating the need to own and manage a datacenter.
This webinar will explain how businesses of any size can create a highly efficient and effective disaster recovery plan with Double-Take® Cloud, a solution that leverages Amazon Web Services’ extensive capacity on an as-needed basis through the cloud. As a result, the need for costly dedicated disaster recovery data centers and the associated hardware, software, real estate, power, cooling and management overhead is eliminated – providing end users with a simple, easy-to-use and affordable disaster recovery solution.
The webinar will cover how to:
- Backup and recover in the cloud, eliminating the need to own and manage a datacenter.
- Set up world-class disaster recovery for any Windows server in about an hour.
- Reduce downtime to minutes, recover any Windows server into Amazon Web Services easily and protect any database or application server with no additional hardware.
Attendees will also be able to ask questions during the live Q&A session with Amazon Web Services and Double-Take Software experts, Brian Matsubara and Peter Laudenslager.
Webinar Details:
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Double-Take Cloud & Amazon Web Services: Worried at Breakfast, Protected by Lunchtime |
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Wednesday, April 21, 2010; 11:00 am – 12:00 pm ET |
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Brian Matsubara, Amazon Web Services, and Peter Laudenslager, Double-Take Software |
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http://bit.ly/9c4Nao |
For more information, go to www.doubletake.com or register for the webinar here.
For the full article, click here!
Posted in Amazon, Backup and Recovery, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Backup, Cloud Computing, Cloud Recovery, Webinar | Tagged: Amazon, Amazon Web Services, aws, backup, Cloud Recovery, Double-Take Cloud, Double-Take Software, recovery, Webinar | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on March 11, 2010
From Enterprise Systems Journal: Double-Take Software’s system state replication engine creates full image of a server workload in the cloud for rapid recovery
Note: ESJ’s editors carefully choose vendor-issued press releases about new or upgraded products and services. We have edited and/or condensed this release to highlight key features but make no claims as to the accuracy of the vendor’s statements.
Double-Take Software has leveraged Amazon Web Services to create a real-time workload recovery platform, Double-Take Cloud, to protect businesses from disaster and keep companies up and running without any upfront costs. Double-Take Cloud leverages the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often reserved for those companies that can afford to build and manage a second data center, complete with back-up servers standing by in case of a disaster or outage — a costly practice that requires significant resources. Other IT departments rely solely on the capabilities of local tape backup, also a time-consuming process with limited recovery capabilities.
Posted in Amazon, Backup and Recovery, Cloud Recovery, RaaS | Tagged: Amazon EC2, cloud backup and recovery, Cloud Disaster Recovery, Cloud Recovery, RaaS, Recovery as a service | Leave a Comment »
Posted by amcanty on March 1, 2010
Cloud computing means many things, but almost all definitions include some key value propositions: scalable on-demand resources, a metered pay-per-use model, access over the Internet, and infrastructure management and optimization that is better than most data centers.At a more conceptual level, cloud computing abstracts away all the undifferentiated IT tasks. Most businesses don’t add any value to their customers or create any competitive advantage for themselves when they buy, build, configure, and manage servers and storage. This is doubly true for disaster recovery equipment and data centers.
Conversely, poor performance in these tasks can cost value and competitive advantage. There is no benefit in doing these tasks well, but there is cost to doing them badly. This is like the opposite of a financial call option – lots of downside risk, but no upside.
For companies planning their first disaster recovery data center, with the associated selection, build, and maintenance tasks for servers, storage, and networking, cloud computing seems like an obvious fit. They can trade the capital expense that buys them no new value, for a no-commitment operating expense that probably buys better operating practices than they could achieve themselves.
Solutions are beginning to grow up around this idea of cloud recovery. The name is a little optimistic because most offerings today are traditional backup solutions, with little or no ability to actually recover in the cloud. Although a lot of vendors in the backup industry are making cloud announcements, they are mostly just letting users store backups in the cloud. In order to really deserve the cloud recovery title a solution should have the following features.
- The ability to recover workloads in the cloud: The cloud can offer more than just a place to dump your backup files. It can provide the computing systems to run your recovered systems, and after a production system fails, the ability to quickly restart a complete replacement with data, applications, and complete configuration in the cloud.
- Effectively unlimited scalability with little or no up-front provisioning: A few vendors can offer rapid, off-site recovery, but they don’t really qualify for the cloud title unless they provide lots of stand-by capacity with no up-front reservations or configuration. While this seems like a lot to ask, this is the promise of cloud computing.
- Pay-per-use billing model: A defining characteristic of cloud computing is that we only pay for the things we use. Use a little this week and pay a little; if we use a lot next week then we pay more, but only for that specific week.
For the rest of the article, click here!
Posted in Backup and Recovery, Cloud Backup, Cloud Computing | Tagged: backup, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Cloud Recovery, data center, IT, pay-per-use, storage | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on February 24, 2010
In the early 1990′s the then administration had intense discussions about what was important to economy and the phrase “It’s the Economy Stupid!” came to light and ultimately helped win the election in 1992. I was thinking about this the other day and realized this same phrase applies to server backup and recovery, then realized that it isn’t the backup that is important but more so the ability to recover. IT managers ever day perform backups to protect data, servers, applications in the event the need is to recover those systems but just because there is a duplicate copy never ensures the ability to recover that copy of the server workload in a timely manner. This is where many cloud providers as well as storage vendors may be making the same past mistakes utilizing proprietary solutions only between like hardware or infrastructure.
Just because data may be backed up to tape, disk, a data center or cloud computing infrastructure never guarantees the ability that it can be recovered quickly and efficiently to a new server or virtual machine. In fact, many pains IT managers face is that backups can’t be recovered to dissimilar hardware. If you have a backup of a HP or IBM blade, what are the changes of being able to restore that to a Dell PowerEdge. Probably not good! The challenge is the inoperability of compatible drivers and or hardware and not to mention licensing of recovering that workload to a new or different server that may be available.
Cloud backup and recovery solutions solve much of these issues. Virtualization certainly can add level of complexity to the situation but also greatly helps solve many of these issues. The great thing about being able to backup and recover to a virtual cloud platform as there is no need to care what the server is, just that there is the ability to spin up the virtual machine in the event of a failure and access the workload from the cloud. This is rapidly becoming the 4th dimension of cloud computing platforms, “recovery as a service” in addition to Paas, IaaS, and SaaS.
So just because you have a backup when was the last time there was an attempt to recover? Focusing on improving the speed and efficiency of the recovery process will be better spent than just throwing in another tape to make you feel good. This will also ensure when there is a disaster event there isn’t a scramble to find the latest backup because the recovery procedures have been well exercised and streamlined to bring business operations into production with minimal downtime. Improving recovery will not only let you sleep well at night but will make you a rock star when you can quickly bring workloads online and prove to your executive team everything is under control. So, it isn’t just about the backup it’s the recovery!
Posted in Backup and Recovery, Business Continuity, Cloud Recovery, RaaS | Tagged: Business Continuity, cloud backup and recovery, Cloud Computing, Cloud Disaster Recovery | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on February 17, 2010
Recovery as a Service (RaaS) is a new cloud computing service model and is a combination of the three primary models – Infratructure, Platform or Software as a Service. However “Recovery as a Service” is utilized by companies looking to reduce the recovery time objective for their IT infrastructure backup processes. The RaaS model is an extreme benefit to smaller business that may not have the initial capital or experience to create a redundant or disaster recovery data center. The length of time it takes to even receive archived tape media from an offsite location and recover the lost server renders it an ineffective disaster recovery solution. With a “Recovery as a Service” model, companies can easily backup entire servers in real-time to a cloud provider like Amazon EC2 all for a very low cost service fee that includes the cost of software, hardware and storage. This isn’t a consumer solution like Mozy or Carbonite that backs up your kid’s iTunes. This is a big boy solution that allows companies to backup entire servers or data centers including the operating system, applications as well as the associated data.
In the event one of those servers or an entire data center is lost those replicated server images can be spun up in the cloud infrastructure and run from the remote location as if you had a duplicate data center with up-to-date data for maximum productivity. This provides a company a business continuity solution and the ability to service their customers even when there is an interruption of business critical systems at the office. When the original primary data center or server has been all the changes that have been made to the server workload running in the cloud can be replicated back and restored with minimal interruption. This is “Recovery as a Service” and it will be one of the fastest growing cloud computing trends in 2010.
Posted in Backup and Recovery, Cloud Computing, RaaS, SaaS, Server Recovery | Tagged: Backup and Recovery, Cloud Computing 101, Cloud Computing Backup, Cloud Recovery, Recovery as a service, software as a service | 1 Comment »
Posted by brennels on February 8, 2010
When the term cloud computing first generated a buzz it was typically referring to utilizing software as a service or otherwise known in the industry as (SaaS). Google is probably most known software as a service but then others in the social media industry rapidly shot up like Facebook, Twitter and My Space as well as other hosted applications that were more business critical. Although SaaS was one of the first technical adoptions of the cloud in the last few years, Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) have also become viable solutions and maybe more beneficial to companies than just software.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Other than the search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo what can these (SaaS) models do to help a company. The Social Media applications are quickly replacing traditional marketing like print advertising so this is one area but there are many other SaaS available that can help improve efficiency and productivity. Anything from website hosting, content management and or just a dependable database for backend infrastructure are all available for a quick deployment.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Platform as a Service is more popular and mostly utilized by the developer community and was likely started with the introduction and popularity of Linux open source code. This cloud computing model provides a platform for developers to code, test and experiment new software without the complexity of setting up and maintaining test, development and production servers.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Infrastructure as a service is probably where many large companies like HP, IBM, Amazon and Rackspace are focusing their attention. This service model provides both companies as well as consumers the ability to utilize already optimized and maintained virtualized resources at a data center via a web service or VPN connection. Many will use this to backup, recover data files and or full servers in the event of a loss and that resource needs to be recovered. It can also serve as the primary server and actually run the application workload from this location alleviating the company IT staff of having to procure and or maintain the server infrastructure and or application expertise to provide that service. This is typically billed on a per use basis so only the resources, processing and or storage used is billed at the end of each month.
These are the big three but is there a forth that is already in progress. It is already being adopted by some companies as well as being discussed and that is Recovery as a Service (RaaS). Stay tuned for the next blog post Cloud 101 – Recovery as a Service: How it works
Posted in Backup and Recovery, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Computing, Cloud Recovery, IaaS, PaaS (Platform as a Service), RaaS, SaaS, Server Recovery | Tagged: Cloud Computing, Cloud Recovery, IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service, PaaS, Platform as a Service, RaaS, Recovery as a service, SaaS, software as a service | 5 Comments »
Posted by brennels on January 28, 2010
Orginally Posted by ZDNet January 21st.
Chris Pyle, CEO of Champion Solutions Group, spent a bit of time talking about the needs of mid market companies and how cloud computing could be a useful approach to facing their IT requirements while holding the line on spending. The survey data that I’ve seen on cloud computing adoption and the experiences of Champion Solutions in the market seem to align very nicely. I guess that either means we’re both seeing the same things or, we’re both way off base. I guess only time will tell.
Although I don’t have the space to present the topics we discussed point by point, I can offer a summary.
- Small to medium sized organizations as well as local and state (or region) governments are facing serious budgetary challenges. They’d really like to have all of the IT tools that bigger organizations use because they face the same conditions, but they have neither the desire nor the budget to maintain a datacenter or an IT organization made up of developers, administrators, help desk personnel and the like. Outsourcing some or, perhaps, all of these functions could make a great deal of sense.
Read the rest of the article here
Posted in Backup and Recovery, Champion Cloud Services, Cloud Architecture, PaaS (Platform as a Service) | Tagged: Champion Cloud Services, Cloud Recovery, Double-Take Backup | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on January 27, 2010
By Andrew Burton
“Many vendors are positioning cloud backup as an ideal disaster recovery solution, allowing users to replicate data offsite and outside of their company’s geographic region at a reasonable cost. And, there are even a number of so-called cloud disaster recovery services on the market today. But, what does “cloud disaster recovery” really mean?
In this tutorial on cloud disaster recovery, learn about cloud disaster recovery vs. cloud backup; hybrid disaster recovery approaches; and security concerns with cloud backup and disaster recovery.”
CLOUD DISASTER RECOVERY TUTORIAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is cloud disaster recovery?
Online data backup and recovery services
A hybrid approach to disaster recovery
Data center on demand
Security concerns with online backup
Read the full article here on SearchDisasterRecovery.com
Posted in Backup and Recovery, Business Continuity, Cloud Availability, Cloud Recovery | Tagged: Cloud Backup, Cloud Recovery, Disaster Recovery | 2 Comments »
Posted by brennels on January 13, 2010
OK I’m back from the holidays and just recently presented a webinar on how to protect entire virtual infrastructure in the cloud and the risks of having your entire datacenter residing on a few virtual servers. Unlike the old days if a server went down the only impact was what ever the application that was running on that server. Now with consolidated virtualized infrastructure if a physical server goes down there could be a dozen virtual machines go offline simultaneously. I believe Amazon still met the SLA but this article should serve as good information for anyone looking to implement a 100% virtualized environement without some sort of loal failover capabilities.
Carl Brooks, Technology Writer | SearchCloudComputing.com wrote a great article on the latest outage impact from an Amazon customer ”Heroku learns the hard way from Amazon EC2 outage“
Ruby on Rails Platform as a Service startup Heroku started off the new year with a nasty surprise. Without warning on January 2, all of the specialized, high-capacity Amazon EC2 instances that run its popular application and development service disappeared in the blink of an eye. Twenty-two virtual machines, approximately $20,000 per month in hosting fees for high-memory m2.2xlarge instances, suddenly vanished, leaving Heroku’s estimated 44,000 running applications in the lurch.
Amazon blamed a routing device in its Virginia data center, and the service was back up in an hour. But Oren Teich, Heroku’s product developer, said this is one of the many important lessons new ventures and businesses need to learn before they decide to work entirely in the cloud. Traditional contingency planning doesn’t go far enough, he said: expect the unexpected.
Read the full article here on SearchCloudComputing.com
Posted in Amazon, Backup and Recovery, Business Continuity, Cloud Availability, Cloud Providers, Cloud Recovery | Tagged: Amazon EC2, Disaster Recovery, searchcloudcomputing.com, Virtualization Risks | 1 Comment »
