Technical Blog

The one support issue that comes up regularly is an inability of the software on the user’s site to communicate with the vault. Many firewalls assume that all traffic that originates from behind the firewall is legitimate, but many others block all traffic except for those considered absolutely necessary, such as HTTP over ports 80 [...]

Microsoft have put a lot of effort into security of it’s products over the last 5 or so years through their Secure by Design/Secure by Default initiatives. Basically they look to switch off every non-core feature to ensure that the inexperienced administrator doesn’t leave something exploitable running by accident. This is Good News™ but it [...]

The Register recently featured a piece on the hidden costs of a virtualised environment called “Counting the cost of virtualization”. It flags up the often ignored point that while the hypervisor and OS might be free (VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V are all free, and some OSs permit multiple guests on one host [...]

Asigra have always produced technical documentation that explained how the platform works, but up until now we could only circulate it on a case by case basis. Asigra have now produced a series of documents to explain the “Asigra Advantage”. They cover specifics of the architecture, continuous backup, deduplication, encryption, security and many other topics. [...]

We’ve changed location to the Conrad Hotel on Earlsfort Terrace.

We’re holding another of our engineer training days at the end of the month in the Hilton Hotel at Charlemont Place, Dublin. We’ll be covering installation, configuration, support and monitoring of the Asigra Televaulting platform and an overview of our other services. It’s tentatively scheduled for the afternoon of the 28th so contact peter.fogarty@centraldatabank.com to [...]

Asigra Inc. have just released a new version of their award winning online backup and vaulting software. We should receive delivery within the next week and hope to have it in production use before the end of April. Highlights include support for Windows 2008 servers and improved support for Vista. Support for application layer backups [...]

Journalspace.com have just demonstrated why RAID is not a backup. They were doing the following: “…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 [...]

Server consolidation is driving deployment of virtualisation across enterprises of all sizes. However, to fully realize the benefits of virtualisation, organisations must consider their information recovery management strategy. Traditional backup and recovery strategies are not adequate to deliver the granular recovery demanded by the business. More important, the cost associated with traditional or agent based [...]

Christmas is coming and Central Databank’s offices will close on Tuesday the 23rd of December at 4pm. We will re-open on Monday the 5th of January. We will still provide helpdesk and DR coverage during the break. The helpdesk will be manned from 9am – 6pm on the 29th & 30th, from 9am to 3pm [...]