Asigra Televaulting’s DS-Client communicates with the vault over port 4401 tcp, so your firewall must permit traffic originaing from the client computer on this port. If you wish you can lock the destination. We’d prefer if you specify host “vault01.centraldatabank.com”, but if you must use an IP, “195.60.166.11″ is the current vault IP address. this may change with short notice, so we always recommend using the host name.

If you want to run a quick test to make sure the port is correctly configured, open a command prompt on the system DS-Client is installed on and run

telnet vault01.centraldatabank.com 4401

If you get a “connect failed” error you need to fix the firewall. If everything is working fine the screen should go blank.

Firstly they totally removed the MAPI Client libraries from the 2007 edition. This is the core function that Asigra Televaulting’s DS-Recovery Tools (AKA message level backup) uses to backup Exchange. Thankfully you can download and install the MAPI Client and CDO from here.

The other piece of bad news is that Service Pack 1 disabled the Remote Streaming function by default. The only way to re-enable it is to edit the registry as follows:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\ParametersSystem

Name: Enable Remote Streaming Backup
Type: DWORD
Value: 0 = default behavior (remote backup disabled);
1 = remote backup enabled

Once you restart the server the new settings should be applied and backups should run without errors.

-Gary

Backup provision has traditionally been one of those costs. You may need to buy host and application agents for each VM. Unless your backup platform is capable of doing network-wise de-duplication (most aren’t) you’ll see a massive rise in the quantity of backup data as you have to backup multiple instances of an OS and application data. This can mean moving from a standalone drive to an autoloader, and will mean a lot more tapes to juggle. Operationally it’s desirable to have each VM running as lean as possible. The load caused by multiple backup agents on a host server can be considerable, so you may need to revise upwards your CPU and RAM needs.

Asigra Televaulting is the one backup technology that can take a migration to virtualised environment without a huge cost increase. Unlike any other online backup platform in use in Ireland today, Asigra Televaulting does not use agents, so the server can devote all it’s resources to applications, rather than servicing a backup job. Obviously because it doesn’t use agents, there are no charges for agents.

Asigra Televaulting’s compression technology also does an impressive job of controlling storage usage. Enterprise-wide deduplication means you’ll usually only store (and pay for) one copy of the OS, regardless of how many virtual systems it’s installed on. It uses a system of “libraries”. Files that appear more than twice on a site are considered “common” and are stored in the site library. Shortcuts to the library version are created instead of backing up the file again. If a file appears on more than two sites it’s promoted to the account library for all sites to link to, rather than transmit & store their own copy.

Asigra Televaulting has a large number of extra features that position it as the best tool for off-site backups of virtualised platforms today.

• Backup at the host and/or guest layer
• Live whole-VM backup
• File level recovery at the VM and guest OS level
• Any-to-any restore capability (P2P, P2V, V2V or V2P)
• Comprehensive enterprise application support
• Extensive mixed physical/virtual OS support
• Next generation features including global data de-duplication, Continuous Data Protection (CDP), grid-based scalability and intelligent data retention
• Automatic upgrade to newer versions when they are available from CDB’s vault

The Asigra Televaulting service page on our site includes several feature & function specific brochures, including comprehensive coverage of it’s virtualisation support.

- Gary

DS-Client updates will be automatically pushed and installed on customer sites. In most cases this should go unnoticed, but those with very restrictive security configurations may notice an issue. As normal we’ll notify resellers and/or customers if we notice a backup hasn’t run. Support will be discontinued for new installs on Windows 2000 systems (upgrades are supported), and the budget allocation module. This is instead being replaced by a new DS-Billing tool.

Asigra have also put a lot of work into delivering a fully NIST certified security infrastructure (an industry first), with the AES encryption, random number generator, digital signature and HMAC modules all being NIST certified. This new security architecture should also be fully FIPS 140-2 certified in the near future.

“…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.

Traditional agent based backup and recovery force the enterprise into a series of unattractive choices. Agent based technologies pollute the virtual environment. Agents, by their nature, lack cohesion. The need to physically install and manage agents on each application within the virtual server and each machine on the LAN is time and labour intensive. A single agent adds as much as 16% server overhead to each application. Add to that the security risk and cost of each agent and it becomes quite clear, agent-based backup and recovery dramatically impacts the TCO and performance of the virtual environment.

Read more about this topic in the Information Recovery Management: VMware overview paper.