“…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.

For things to work effectively we have a procedure in place for our partners to follow. The highlights are:

• Inform us beforehand, so we can pre-warn the security staff (all unexpected deliveries are refused at the door) and have staff waiting to do the import as soon as it comes in.
• USB or NAS only please! We don’t support FireWire or eSATA disks.
• Format the disk as FAT32 and not NTFS. We run Linux on the vault, and NTFS only works on Windows. XP’s format tool will only format partitions up to 32GB, so you may need to use Ridgecorp’s free fat32format tool to format a larger disk. You can download it here.
• Bubble-wrap is your friend. Hard disks are fragile and do get damaged in the post unless well padded. We’ve had several cases where the disk has arrived in bits.

Drop us a line and we’ll e-mail you the full procedure document.

How To Get Here
The building is just off the Merrion Road, near the RDS. The nearest DART stop is Sandymount, and the 4, 4a, 5, 7, 7a, 8 & 45 bus routes all stop close by. Please see below for the location and driving directions. There is plentiful on-street parking available on Beatty’s Avenue and Herbert Cottages.

View Larger Map
Once you get there take the lift to the 1st floor and follow the signs to the Regus reception desk to sign in.

Agenda
During the 3 hour training session we’ll be covering

• Installation & configuration
• Common issues
• Suport escalations
• Account management using the web portal
• Initial backup and DR processes

The morning session starts at 9am, and the afternoon one starts at 1:45pm.

VSS is supported for Windows XP SP1, Windows 2003 & Windows Vista systems. To enable it in exisiting backup sets, edit the backup set, select “Advanced Options” and check the “Backup through volume shadow copies” box.

Asigra Televaulting 8.0 introduces a grid configuration for Windows clients. This allows you to have a master system and one or more slave systems with the processing load dynamically distributed evenly across the systems. Fault tolerance is also improved because any system can fail and the grid will stay operational. If the master system fails, one of the slave systems will automatically take it’s place and the backups will keep on running. This is a free feature for all customers.

• Industry’s most advanced virtual server backup
  First to support VMware ESXi and all popular virtual server platforms
  Eliminates requirements for custom VCB script development
  Agent-free for non-intrusive performance, interoperability, low-touch management and more
  Any-to-any restore capability
  Bare metal recovery
  Automated mass deployment
• Intelligent archiving
  Policy-based backup lifecycle management
  Long-term de-duplicated data retention up to 21 years
  Storage hardware cost reduction
• Multi-directional data center replication
  Replacement of storage-storage replication
  One-to-one, many-to-one or many-to-many replication
• Enterprise application-aware support
  SAP, SharePoint, Oracle, MS-SQL, DB2, MS-Exchange, Lotus Notes, GroupWise and more
• DS-Client grid-based scalability
  Enables seamless capacity and performance growth
  Unmatched reliability through robust architecture

The final phase of the process will happen next Thursday morning (14th August). DS-Clients will automatically start downloading and installing the client upgrade once they connect to the vault for the first time after we upgrade the vault. This may mean Thursday night’s backup will be skipped, so you should run a manual backup on Friday morning.

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.