Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Good read this: It is virtually impossible for a cloud vendor to offer a strong SLA for two reasons. First, the cost advantage of the cloud is based on shared resources, although IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) is now pushing the idea of creating and running private clouds for its large customers. But even if a cloud is private, the fact that many applications are running on a shared infrastructure increases the risk of catastrophe. The second reason is that offering a really strong SLA, one that covers the lost revenue from an outage, is just too risky. It means putting the vendor's entire enterprise at risk, essentially selling a form of insurance on the cheap. That's why in the cloud and elsewhere, SLAs will never be that strong. Without SLAs to provide much comfort, the real remedy to managing catastrophic outages is redundancy. If your cloud infrastructure fails for a critical system, you must be able to bring up a redundant infrastructure that performs the same funct...

Nice writeup this. I would too like to test it out, if I ever get the time. Introduction As a demo/test I wanted to build a complete SRM setup with both sites being protected. This requires two SRM installations and configurations and two replicated LUN’s. Since I am rather limited in available hardware at the moment, I needed to run every component in a virtual Machine on a single laptop. Luckily, LeftHand Networks has a virtual SAN appliance, which actually is supported by VMware SRM. This way, I can use a supported SAN, and still use ony one laptop. All used software (VMware ESX, vCenter, LeftHand VSA and Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005) are available for free (or as evaluation software). Hardware and host software I’m running all this on a Zepto Znote 6324W with a Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 (Penryn, 2,5Ghz with Intel VT and Execute Disable Bit), 4GB of RAM and a 200GB 7200RPM SATA2 hard disk. This laptop is running Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (64-bits), with VMware Workstatio...

I spoke to FalconStor guys a few days before the laucnh of the news and will be collaborating with them closely as SRM gaining traction within lots of our Customers across EMEA. For now here's the news: MELVILLE, N.Y., Sept. 15, 2008 —FalconStor Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC), the provider of TOTALLY Open™ data protection solutions, today announced FalconStor ® Network Storage Server (NSS) Virtual Appliance for VMware ESX, enabling customers to transform their existing direct-attached storage into an iSCSI virtual SAN appliance for VMware environments. The FalconStor NSS Virtual Appliance has been validated by the VMware Ready Virtual Appliance program, assuring customers of its full compatibility with VMware. By offering trial downloads and a free limited version of FalconStor NSS Virtual Appliance, FalconStor is helping to accelerate adoption of virtualization throughout the small-to-medium sized business (SMB) and remote-office markets. "FalconStor is delivering...

IBM (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) plans to spend $300 million this year to build 13 "cloud computing" data centers where businesses can store information for quick retrieval in case their computer systems are destroyed in a disaster. Cloud computing refers to services accessed via the Web that seem to exist in a cloud over the Internet. The computing giant, which will unveil the plan on Wednesday, is building the sites in 10 countries, including China, Japan, Turkey, Poland, France and the United States. Source

Take the Disaster Out of Disaster Recovery Easily manage and implement your recovery plan with VMware Site Recovery Manager. As an integrated element of your VMware virtual infrastructure, Site Recovery Manager helps you build, manage and execute reliable disaster recovery plans. Site Recovery Manager lets you: Accelerate recovery for the virtual environment through automation. Ensure reliable recovery by enabling non-disruptive testing. Simplify recovery by eliminating complex manual recovery steps and centralizing management of recovery plans. Accelerate Recovery Ensure that you are able to meet your recovery time objectives (RTO’s) by automating the recovery process. VMware Site Recovery Manager eliminates the slow manual steps of recovery, turning the complex paper runbooks associated with traditional disaster recovery into an integrated part of your virtual infrastructure management. Ensure Reliable Recovery Eliminate common causes of failure during recovery and mak...

BOULDER, Colo. – April 8, 2008 – ProStor Systems, a leading developer of removable disk storage solutions for data protection and archive applications, today announced the overwhelming success of its ProAlliance™ Partner Program with the signing of more than 30 high-value resellers. Working together with ProStor Systems to secure sales of InfiniVault™, the world’s first removable disk archive system, these VARs are targeting organizations that want to deploy a fast, secure and reliable platform for long-term data preservation, e-discovery and regulatory compliance in a single, integrated system. ProStor’s InfiniVault is sold exclusively through the North American reseller channel, with expansion into the European market later this year. Since the debut of the ProAlliance Partner Program last October, VARs serving various industries such as finance, government, healthcare and legal have signed up. “We have seen tremendous interest for a solution such as ProStor’s InfiniV...

This user had some mixed experiences: My company has tried VMware VCB with very mixed results which is not good for a backup solution. When we tried to restore some vms, they appeared as they had crashed. In talking with VMware support they acknowledge this is "an issue" that they're working on. I don't know what that means, but that's unacceptable for any backup solution. We've seen that Windows 2008 hyperv has a live backup feature that somehow integrates with vss. This could be the perfect solution if it works. Any news on that? And this article attempts to cover the backup dilemma in the Virtual World: Traditional backup systems have a one-to-one relationship with servers. These tried-and-true backup systems and associated software already support storage-area networks (SAN), fiber optics, and the latest operating system and server hardware updates. But they are not geared specifically for the complex world of virtualization, which involves multiple guest ...

Data Protection and Rapid Recovery 3.1 includes integrated support for VMware's ESX 3.0 Server Backup and VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) and improved Windows integration, providing support for virtualization environments as well as Microsoft SQL MSDE and Exchange 2007. Unitrends has beefed up its archiving platform in several different areas, according to Maria Ellison, senior vice president of product services management. Upgrades include expanded application support and support for virtual environments via API integration with VMware Consolidated Backup. However, she says, the "game changer" for Unitrends is its new central management console. "We had an adequate Linux user interface in the past, but it was not centralized. Everything had to be managed separately," says Ellison. "We benchmarked our new interface for ease of use against the big boys, including Symantec Backup Exec, Microsoft Data Protection Manager, and Windows Home Server, and we believ...

Organizations of all sizes struggle with the daily challenge of recovering and optimizing critical workloads – either associated with the operational recovery of individual files or servers, or even at the point of a catastrophic disaster. Because Double-Take Software has specifically designed useful recovery tools to run on the VMware platform, IT professionals are able to leverage the feature-rich VMware virtual machine platform in conjunction with Double-Take to ensure cost-effective and seamless disaster recovery. This webinar will focus on the following topics: Physical to virtual disaster recovery Virtual to virtual disaster recovery Virtual machine provisioning and automated creation Full server protection and failover Migration and consolidation Link

"Since our software replicates the server, and clones everything from the software to the server identity and all data between the two machines, there's just maybe a 15-second [downtime] window in a failover situation," John Posovatz, Neverfail's vice president of product management, told InternetNews.com. The software provides centralized monitoring, remote management and fast provisioning capabilities, and serves as the control point for services such as VMware VMotion and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). VMotion enables live virtual machines to be migrated between physical servers, while DRS dynamically allocates capacity within a group of VMware ESX Server hosts. More here...

While Citrix XenServer takes advantage of the TCO benefits virtualization offers through server consolidation, SteelEye's Protection Suite for Citrix XenServer is an essential addition for companies to ensure continuity of the virtualization environment; plus, it integrates advanced data replication and high availability clustering technologies to monitor and automatically recover the entire Xen environment. SteelEye delivers several distinct data and application management functions, all integrated into a single solution for simple deployment. It is built on breakthrough technology which supports clustering together physical and/or virtual servers for continuous data protection, application availability and disaster recovery while providing real-time replication of active Xen Virtual Machine images. "This is a powerful alliance," said Garrett Gafke, President of SteelEye. "As a long-time supporter of the use of open source technologies for business-critical computin...

Hi Steve, please tell us a bit about yourself? My background: I have spent about 25 years of my career in the data storage industry and was one of the founders of Exabyte Corp. Before founding ProStor, I was the CEO of Network Photonics, a telecom equipment manufacturer. I hold about 20 U.S. and international patents. Tell us a bit about ProStor, how did it come to life? The ProStor founders have a long history in the backup and archive markets. ProStor Systems came to life after recognizing that disk-to-disk backup solutions would not be able to replace tape until there was a form of removable media for offsite storage for disaster recovery and for long-term archive at low cost. This prompted the development of RDX® removable disk technology. Tell us about InfiniVault Appliance? InfiniVault™ is the first storage system to take advantage of RDX removable disk medi...

They plan to do this on Monday. John Posavatz, Neverfail vice president for product marketing told IT PRO its VMware using customers found an increasing reliance on VirtualCentre features like VMotion and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to manage their virtual environments had introduced a single point of failure. VMware VMotion enables the migration of live virtual machines between physical servers and VMware DRS dynamically allocates and balances computing capacity within a group of VMware ESX Server hosts. Link

We have just finished the report, you will get this one very soon at several places and events: Places: Avastu's site (Go to White Papers) Events: European Virtualization Event by Profoss

Just heard from the Robert , our CRCdataprotection CEO, that Asigra, who are CRC's partners as well BTW, are certified for SAP's Netweaver product. See the inforrmation below: ASIGRA Televaulting 8.0 Certification Category: Backup, Database Backup Qualifications: Certified for SAP NetWeaver SAP Interface SAP Release Levels Solution Interface Software Certified Functions Certification Date BC-BRI HPUX 700 - Backup Tools 7.00 w Oracle DB 10g, HP Unix 64Bit SAP NetWeaver Application Server ...

Its been a long time that I covered Platespin, but anyways here it is! Announced today, PlateSpin Forge consists of a dual-processor Dell server equipped with 2.5TB of SATA RAID storage, VMware ESX Server virtualization, the underlying PlateSpin PowerConvert P2V software, and the PlateSpin Forge user interface. Together, these components can protect up to 25 “workloads,” running either Windows or Linux, within a VMware Virtual Machine Disk Format or Virtual Hard Disk format or on a physical box. “To us, a workload is a workload,” said Cadman Chui, PlateSpin vice president of marketing. Forge, Chui explains, simply takes an image of the workload and saves it as a virtual machine (VM). Then, on a scheduled basis, Forge takes the incremental changes that have happened on the VM and applies them. How often Forge takes an image of the workload depends on its criticality. Recovery, meanwhile, can take place directly on the Forge hardware appliance or back on another virtual or physical host ...

Quoting Symantec: Core Facts * Inadequate Disaster Recovery Planning and Testing - Symantec today announced the findings of an international study indicating that while 91 percent of IT organisations carry out full scenario testing of their disaster recovery plans incorporating relevant people, processes and technologies, nearly 50 percent of those tests fail. This means that one in two UK organisations is not equipped to handle events, such as natural disasters, computer system failures and external computer threats. * Nearly Half Executed Disaster Recovery Plan – Nearly half of IT organisations surveyed have had to execute their company’s disaster recovery plans. The research findings show that 48 percent of organisations have had to execute disaster recovery plans and 44 percent surveyed without a disaster recovery plan experienced one problem or disaster, while 26 percent experience two or more, and 11 percent experienced three or more. Go to Symantec's site.