Bad news for GoGrid customers as today we received the following breach notification by email… Dear Valued Customer: In the normal process of reviewing our system activity, our Security Team discovered that an unauthorized third party may have viewed your account information, including payment card data. We immediately took action to protect our custom […]
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now less than three three weeks away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 […]
“For SMBs who need to keep those servers rolling, Geminare shows that cloud-based server recovery can not only be affordable but also easy, and provide fast failback as well.
When I’ve talked to companies for articles about high availability, business continuity, or disaster recovery, particularly keeping server-oriented applications available, there’s often a Bermuda Triangle of handwaving fuzziness about the fail-over and the fail-back, glossing over the time and IT cost to get that transaction database up and running again, or to restore it when the main site is available again — hours to days to rebuilt a database, for example.
If I’m talking to a non-stop, fault-tolerant provider like Stratus, it doesn’t happen, but with many BC/DR solutions and their providers, it often feels like they’re being less than forthcoming about the realities. It often feels to me like while the acquisition cost of a fault-tolerant, high-availability solution may be greater than a BC/DR one (although not necessarily — see my ScaleMP post), but if there’s any actual need to utilize BC/DR, the total out-of-pocket cost including resuming operations can be higher (not to mention the cost of lost availability, productivity, and sales).”
Imagine a world where code used by the biggest clouds is freely available to any developer, anywhere. A world where that code was a standard used to build private clouds as well as a variety of new service offers. In this world, workloads could be moved around these clouds easily – you could fire your cloud provider for bad service or lack of features, but not have to rewrite the software to do it. Imagine an open source cloud operating system that lifts IT to the next level of innovation, just as Linux drove the web to new heights.
Today, we at Rackspace launched an ambitious project called OpenStack that aims to make this new world a reality.
I want to lay out the thinking that got us here and why we think this moment will change computing forever.
“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.”
“Ever since the introduction of Double-Take Cloud, we’ve been getting a lot of questions as to how our cloud systems are configured, where they are hosted, what type of VM hosts we’re running, etc. I thought it would be good to do a DT: 101 article on the fact that Double-Take Software is not, in fact, a cloud provider of any kind – which is saying a lot these days.
Everyone from Oracle to EMC is re-branding themselves as a “cloud company,” and for the most part they’re right on the money. Oracle has been offering Software as a Service (SaaS) for quite some time now, and EMC is a great platform to build a private cloud on (as are any of the other mass-storage providers). But this rush to re-brand as cloud companies can be confusing, especially when companies that make cloud-enabling technology (like Double-Take Cloud) can get muddled in with the cloud infrastructure providers.
So, for the record, Double-Take Software is not a cloud company. We do not host servers for Infrastructure on Demand, nor do we provide SaaS solutions, though Double-Take Cloud is pretty close to that last definition. What we are is a software company that makes quite a few technologies that can effectively power your cloud ambitions, and are used by many cloud companies as well.”
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:
What:
Double-Take Cloud & Amazon Web Services: Worried at Breakfast, Protected by Lunchtime
When:
Wednesday, April 21, 2010; 11:00 am – 12:00 pm ET
Who:
Brian Matsubara, Amazon Web Services, and Peter Laudenslager, Double-Take Software
“As customers get more comfortable with storing data across multiple devices and into the cloud, solution providers will be called on to ensure that data is protected in a way that ensures compliance with corporate and governance requirements. That’s the conclusion of a panel of storage vendors and a solution provider who Thursday discussed trends related to protecting data at rest on the Everything Channel Virtual Trade show.
Customers are starting to centralize their storage in order to better manage the protection and archiving of their data, said Jamie Shepard, executive vice president of technology solutions at International Computerware, a Marlborough, Mass.-based solution provider.
“Customers are moving data to the data center where they can lock it down,” Shepard said.
The adoption of software-as-a-service and the gradual understanding of the benefits of computing clouds will accelerate the centralization of data, especially to storage clouds, Shepard said.
“With the cloud, everything is built as a service,” he said. “When you are talking about security as a service, it’s easy to bring data back (to a cloud) and lock it down.”
Both Shepard and the manufacturers on the panel agreed that cloud computing is going to have a major impact on data protection. However, there was some friendly disagreement about whether the impact will be felt more in public or private clouds.
Bob Roudebush, director of solutions engineering at data protection software vendor Double-Take said that data loss prevention is a major driver for getting customers to move to public clouds. Cloud computing provider Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN), for example, is spending more than just about everyone but Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) and EMC (NYSE:EMC) on protecting data in the cloud, he said.
Shepard said he does not agree that public clouds are the best way to protect customer data. “I prefer to help customers build private clouds to protect their data,” he said.
Roudebush said that smaller companies will actually find it easier to move to a public cloud. However, in either case, “they need to be able to protect the data in the cloud,” he said.”
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.
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!
Double-Take Software today announced the release of Double-Take Cloud which provides full server protection, failover and recovery using Amazon Ec2 Web Services infrastructure. According to Peter Laudenslager, Double-Take Cloud project leader, this is the only solution that allows businesses to replicate entire server workloads, including the operating system, applications and associated data in real-time and failover to the Amazon Ec2 infrastructure in the event of a failure.
Peter went on to differentiate the Double-Take Cloud solution from others who claim they backup to a cloud computing infrastructure. “With the Double-Take Cloud solution, a customer can recover a failed server into the cloud in less time that it would take a traditional vaulting company to deliver a tape. This isn’t like all the on-line backup offerings that seem to be sprouting up; this isn’t some scaled-up, laptop oriented, file-copy application rebranded as “cloud”. This is best-in-class, real-time replication and full system state recovery. It’s an industrial grade solution capable of protecting Exchange, MS-SQL, and Windows Domain Controllers – in fact, it will protect just about any Windows application or file server, and recover it perfectly, in the cloud.“
This is an interesting challenge to the market that could subvert the traditional backup paradigm as there are many companies that claim they provide solutions to backup and recovery full server workloads what they don’t tell you is they haven’t solved the original problem of being able to recover rapidly to dissimilar hardware. So, there may be a backup copy of the server somewhere accessible from the internet but the chances are it isn’t any easier to use than if it was sitting on a tape that needed to be recovered.
Peter Laudenslager from Double-Take Software went on to say: “In the past, businesses had to choose between investing in the equipment, facilities, and expertise to quickly recover critical business systems from a failure, or not investing, and having little or no ability to recover. Double-Take Cloud is simple enough and inexpensive enough that every business can have a great recovery solution. Now, for a monthly fee, they can get all the hardware, software, and infrastructure they need to get real-time data protection and rapid system recovery, in the cloud.“
This is a relatively new model for Double-Take Software as they will be providing the ability to purchase Double-Take Cloud licenses online at https://buy.doubletake.com/cloud for a low monthly fee in a pay-as-you-go service. There are then the Amazon storage fees that would be in addition but according to the Amazon pricing structure for the EC2 this could be as little as a few cents for every gigabyte of data stored.
The Double-Take Cloud release could be a challenge to some storage providers offering propietary storage solutions that realistically don’t reduce the recovery time objective any more than traditional tape recovery solutions. It will be interesting to see if storage vendors and or other cloud providers will open up new opportunities for Double-Take Software to provide the real-time replication and full server recovery capabilities they are missing in order to increase their adoption in the cloud computing marketing.
Smarter, Virtualized Disaster Recovery Alternative Removes Many of the Conventional Barriers to Solid DR Planning; Pay Only for Services You Need, At Time You Need Them
“BOCA RATON, FL — (February 9th, 2010) — Champion Cloud Services, a unit of IT services delivery provider Champion Solutions Group, today announced an innovative enterprise-class data recovery program that promises to remake the Disaster Recovery (DR) realm: “Cloud Continuity” DR services. Leveraging the groundbreaking benefits of cloud computing, Champion’s Cloud Continuity services allow enterprises—especially growing mid-market businesses—to utilize an on-demand DR capability that delivers exactly the amount of IT resources needed, at the very time they’re needed most.
“Champion Cloud Services has developed a DR solution that dramatically lowers the price/risk ratio for the modern enterprise,” said Chris Pyle, president and CEO of Champion Solutions Group. “Now you can ensure the continuity of your data stores—and your business—without having to invest in a mirror-image, offsite redundant data center. With our on-demand Cloud Continuity offering, the cloud provides everything as you need it.”
No Capital Outlays Unlike traditional disaster recovery paradigms, Champion’s Cloud Continuity solution requires no expensive outlays for a Disaster Recovery infrastructure comprised of defined hardware and software. In the event of an anticipated emergency, the infrastructure is “turned on” and automatically synchronizes with the data for full application availability; afterward it is restored into the business’ onsite, primary infrastructure. Customers pay only for the resources used during the disaster incidence.
Because every customer’s Disaster Recovery requirements are different, Champion Cloud Services is able to set a customized monthly DR fee based on the customer’s Recovery Time Objective (minimum acceptable downtime) and Recovery Point Objective (age of restored files). This allows users to pay only for the necessary service level to keep the business running effectively. Champion’s Cloud Continuity services also range from self-service to fully managed, providing additional flexibility and cost-effectiveness.”
