“…the server which held the journalspace data had two large drives in a RAID configuration. As data is written (such as saving an item to the database), it’s automatically copied to both drives, as a backup mechanism.”

What happened was someone or something deleted their database. Because the drives were mirrored, their “backup” got blanked instantly. What’s worse is that a few months ago a disgruntled ex-employee did something similar and they did nothing to prevent it happening again.

RAID is a High-Availability technology, but that’s all it is. It may preserve data in the case of a hard disk failure, but that’s all. It does nothing to secure data from a virus, a crashing application or OS, or a malicious person. To minimise damage from these events you need to regularly copy your data to another location where it can’t be damaged by the same event.

Ever since JB’s* drunken “rm –rf /” episode on Skynet many moons ago I’ve always made sure that my data is stored in at least two locations. Unix/Linux/OS X (Journalspace was on an OS X system) makes this very easy. It takes 5 minutes to write a shell script that’ll SFTP a database dump to another system and stick it in the crontab. If you need something a bit more involved and secure then we’ll be more than happy to provide you with a service that’ll automate everything and transmit and store data in a secure manner.

This would be funny if that all that happened, but this company’s core business is blog hosting. Their whole business revolved around this database of customer blog posts. This catastrophic failure in judgement is going to put a 7 year old company (which is 100 in Web 2.0 years) out of business, which isn’t nice.

Gary

* Initials only to protect the guilty.

This guy

I’ve got all of the original iMovie projects backed up on DVD, in clear cases, neatly arrayed in a drawer next to my desk. (My hard drive wasn’t big enough to hold those 50 videos a year.)

Guess what? On the Mac I use for video editing, most of the DVD’s were unreadable. They’re less than four years old!

Data deduplication, just in the past year, has become a potentially money-saving technology that shouldn’t be ignored, a Forrester Research Inc. analyst says.

By eliminating a company’s redundant data — with the amount varying by company — deduplication tools are for the first time offering a chance for IT departments to work primarily with disk-based backup, cutting down on affordable but cumbersome magnetic tape storage…..

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LONDON - Wednesday 30th January, 2008 - Asigra Inc., the leader in remote backup and recovery software for global enterprises and service providers, today announced that the company’s flagship product, Asigra Televaulting 8.0, has achieved “Certified for SAP NetWeaver®” status from SAP AG. Asigra Televaulting has been certified for integration with the SAP NetWeaver platform Release 7.0 via the SAP integration scenario BC-BRI HPUX 64 7.0 on Oracle 10g databases. Asigra’s powerful agentless backup and recovery solution is used in multi-national enterprise environments for centralised control and assurance of business continuity and certification with SAP NetWeaver 7.0 expands interoperability.

The certification confirms that Asigra Televaulting complies with the stringent SAP integration standards and interoperates with SAP NetWeaver 7.0 on the HP-UX PA-RISC 11.23 platform and in implementations that include solutions from SAP and Oracle. Televaulting delivers protection of the data maintained in SAP solution-based information stores with capabilities that include database backup with ‘BR backup,’ database restore with ‘BR restore,’ database recovery with ‘BR recover,’ backup of offline redo logs with ‘BR archive,’ and inquire orders to Backint. This provides WAN-optimized backup of these environments and secure encryption of data both in-flight and at-rest. The certification process verified that Asigra Televaulting interoperates with the SAP NetWeaver Application Server 7.0 interface via the BC-BRI HPUX64 7.0 interface using BR*TOOLS 7.0. The Oracle 10gR2 database and HP Unix 64 Bit operating system are used.

“We are pleased that Asigra Televaulting has achieved ‘Certified for SAP NetWeaver’ status and to introduce customers running SAP NetWeaver 7.0 on HP-UX to the benefits that Asigra provides,” said Eran Farajun, executive vice president for Asigra. “As customers move to accelerate business innovation and respond to changing business needs, Asigra’s service-oriented backup and recovery provides a flexible and powerful alternative to traditional agent-based data protection schema. For customers running SAP NetWeaver 7.0 across multiple locations, it is optimised for the wide area network and features storage optimisation, secure data movement in-flight and at-rest, and fast recovery of information repositories when called for.”

About Asigra Televaulting
Asigra Televaulting is agentless, multi-site backup/recovery software that combines utility service provisioning with a disk-based WAN-optimized architecture to overcome the limitations of traditional distributed-backup software. Televaulting’s simple, reliable and affordable multi-site backup and recovery consolidates ROBO backups to a central datacentre. With Asigra’s automated backup, IT management is not required as the entire process is administered centrally. With support for 64-bit environments, organisations using Televaulting will reduce network traffic loads, thereby reducing time and hardware requirements for global enterprise backup. This disk-based backup solution provides more affordable, scalable, reliable, secure and manageable backup than available with conventional backup products.

About Asigra
Asigra is the award-winning leader in remote office/branch office (ROBO) online backup and recovery software for managed backup service providers and global enterprises, protecting more than 50,000 remote sites globally. The company’s flagship product, Televaulting, is used by multi-national enterprises in the financial, insurance, legal, government, healthcare, and retail industries with more than four petabytes of data protected. Asigra technology is used by hundreds of service providers worldwide that offer managed backup services to companies ranging from small and medium businesses (SMBs) to Global 2000 enterprises. The agentless remote site backup and recovery solution provides simple, centralised management of the data protection process while eliminating the capital and operational expenses associated with agent-based solutions. Founded in 1986, Asigra is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with partner offices around the world. For more information, visit www.asigra.com.

Start with a given: If you are a midsized company, you need to develop, test and maintain a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plan. And, don’t start with the excuses that you can’t afford it, don’t have the time and don’t have the resources. At least, that’s the advice from IT managers who have had to rely on their disaster plans.

Christine Forbes, vice president for technology at St. Louis-based insurance company The Daniel and Henry Co., turned to her DR plan after a series of summer storms knocked out much of the electrical service in the city in 2006. “Make sure you have a plan in place, and that you revisit it frequently. We did have a plan, and we realized it wasn’t enough,” Forbes said. “We were fortunate that we actually had revisited it before the power went out. So when it happened we had a much better plan in place.” The DR plan allowed the agency to keep processing storm-related claims.

While the wrath of Mother Nature — best exemplified by earthquakes and hurricanes such as Katrina — has drawn attention to disaster planning, plenty of companies still fail to develop and test plans. “People have started to think more about disaster recovery. But the struggle in SMEs has been how to do it in terms of manpower and money,” said Gary Chen, a senior analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston. “Disasters are more prevalent than people think. But it’s usually the smaller stuff, things like doing construction and cutting power lines or plumbing lines.”

Get business buy-in. Companies that aren’t planning for the worst run the risk of losing customers that require vendors to have a proven DR plan, being fined for lack of regulatory compliance, or even facing bankruptcy. Knowing the risks can help a CIO get executive and departmental backing for a plan.

“There is plenty of evidence that shows that if companies go offline for 10 days or more they have a better than 60% chance of going out of business,” said Mike Karp, a senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo. “The CIO has to tell the CEO what the cost is of not doing it. If we spend a half million dollars on this, how much is it going to cost us if we don’t do it? You start to lose customers, employees and customer satisfaction levels. All of these things start to pile up on the debit side of the ledger.”

First planning steps

Forbes and others offered their advice on how to start preparing for a DR plan:

• Make the commitment. “It’s a lot of effort, it’s an ongoing plan, and you have to constantly update it,” Forbes said.
• Have good backups. Swamy Gundar, director of IT at Sentry Credit Inc. in Seattle, advised, “Make sure you have backups of everything, most importantly base images of all your servers. If you do have to rebuild, you don’t have to spend hours and hours searching for CDs or whatever.” Gundar also suggested IT professionals shouldn’t trust tape. He backs up crucial data on at least two types of media in at least two locations.
• Know what you need. One key to Gundar’s plan is tracking which servers he has, the services they support and what licenses and access methods he needs in an emergency. “There is so much equipment that you may have and you don’t realize you have that you don’t realize are critical to a system until they go down,” said Gundar, whose list of equipment and applications fills a 10-page spreadsheet.
• Test. Forbes advised that companies go through the phone trees that will help to notify employees; practice evacuation of buildings; and test data restoration to make sure data is backed up properly. Gundar added that some of his clients require Sentry to not only have a recovery plan, but also to test it on a regular basis.
• Identify which services must be restored immediately. “We have 15 servers here. We had to know what our critical services were. Was our Blackberry server critical? Probably not, but email was,” Forbes said.
• Know what you will need if you move to a hot site or a mobile data centre. Forbes and Gundar have done just that. In testing his plan last year, Gundar discovered that he didn’t have all of the CDs, licenses and access codes he needed. Forbes discovered that the satellite data services provided through a mobile centre required a clear southern exposure.
• Leverage relationships. Some of the insurance carriers that Forbes’ agency works with had local office space where agency employees could utilize PCs, network access and fax machines. Other employees could work from home offices as long as the core servers were up.
• Know who has to be involved in a recovery. Gundar said a plan must identify which employees should be in the building or backup data centre, who is responsible for tasks such as rerouting phone service, and who should back up those people.
• Learn from those who went before. Gundar noted that some organizations, in particular universities, may have posted their DR plans on the Internet. He said he encourages IT managers to use those plans as free guides for building or modifying their own plans.

James M. Connolly is a freelance writer based in Norwood, Mass. ( jamesmconnolly@verizon.net).

Conventional wisdom says that IT outsourcing is more appropriate for larger companies. Given their scale, they have most to benefit if an outsourcing move goes well and have the internal IT and business management expertise to manage the whole process smoothly.

Yet there are many who argue that outsourcing is just as relevant to small business. John Purdy, managing director of IT-managed services firm Ergo, admits to getting annoyed by the argument that only big companies should outsource. Smaller businesses should do it and what’s more they have been doing it, albeit in areas other than IT, he argues. “SMEs have been outsourcing functions such as legal and finance for a long, long time; they just haven’t been calling it outsourcing.”

When large businesses outsource, they often say it’s because they want to focus on their core business. The same logic applies just as much, if not more so, to the SME area, Purdy maintains.

“Ask 10 companies if they own their own vans – eight will say no. Most people don’t own their own warehouses any more; they have them outsourced to a logistics provider. Why should IT be seen as a core function?”

While most small businesses are reluctant to outsource their IT systems in their entirety they have shown some appetite for managed services, also known as selective outsourcing, which involves handing over the management of particular infrastructural elements such as the desktop or network to an outside provider.

Ergo’s offering in this area is called Remote Managed Services. Through its monitoring centre in Dublin, the company remotely manages the desktops and networks of some 35 clients across a range of sectors. Included are services such as patch management, anti-virus updates and fault monitoring.

“One of the real benefits is improvement in productivity because users don’t have downtime caused by the PCs or servers not working or Exchange going down. That’s all managed proactively and remotely,” says Purdy, who estimates that customers can make cost savings of 20-30pc through using the service while enjoying better performance from their IT system.

David Murphy, director of professional services at another outsourcing provider, Sabeo Technologies, says there are several benefits associated with outsourcing that are applicable to companies of all sizes:

• access to specialist skills that can be expensive and difficult to source
• cost efficiencies – customer may not need the resource full-time so for them to employ a permanent or contract resource can be expensive
• access to additional capacity in specific areas
• access to new technologies
• access to experienced consultants that can advise on IT strategy for systems infrastructure.

Niall Feely, director of business markets, Eircom, feels that while it is still early days for managed services, there is a clear move towards them within the SME market.

On the front line are the hundreds of IT resellers that provide break-fix services and IT support to SMEs that are too small to employ a full-time IT manager.

Gradually, more and more resellers are adding managed services to their service portfolio. Eircom itself is a good example. Though first and foremost a telco and broadband provider, it has begun offering a range of IT managed services to SMEs.

These include a virtual IT manager service, an IT helpdesk that’s run alongside its broadband support service which helps SMEs resolve any hardware or software problems.

According to Feely, a growing number of SMEs are also looking to move their servers off their premises and relocate them into data centres for security and business continuity reasons. “We’re also seeing some quite large deals around hosted Exchange and email. Companies want to get out of all the hassle and grief that goes with patching servers for security reasons and moving that out to service providers completely.”

A variant of this model is the renting of ‘virtual servers’. “They come to us and say they want to run a certain application with these data volumes, providing access to x number of users and it just sits on a shared service infrastructure. It’s early days but we’re definitely seeing a growing demand for these types of services.”

Purdy, too, is seeing growing demand for hosted applications. “It’s already quite prevalent in certain applications such as web hosting and email services but now you’re starting to see more sophisticated stuff such as collaboration applications, CRM applications, payroll and accounting applications.”
There may be a number of factors driving the adopting of the managed services trend but Feely believes they can all be summed up in a single word: hassle.

“For a lot of SMEs, it’s just the sheer hassle; they don’t have the skills, time or the people, so they are looking to service providers to take away all the hassle and do it for them.”

Feely envisages a time in the not-too-distant future when SMEs will maintain a very basic IT infrastructure in-house, place their servers in a secure data centre, access applications such as email through a fat internet pipe and pay for it all via a fixed monthly subscription.

By Brian Skelly (c) SiliconRepublic