Central Databank

Firewalls with Asigra Televaulting

Gary Pigott — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:34:05 +0000

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 & 443.

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.

Backupreview.info’s October rankings are out

Gary Pigott — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:04:58 +0000

In independent rankings Central Databank has been listed as the 16th highest ranking enterprise online backup provider in the world for the month of October. Their standardised evaluation criteria rank providers based on cost, support, customer service, functionality and reliability. Central Databank is ranked 6 places higher than any other Irish provider and is the only Irish provider in the enterprise top 25.

How to backup an Exchange 2007 SP1 server

Gary Pigott — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:40:46 +0000

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 throws two roadblocks in the way of Asigra Televaulting doing it’s backups.

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

Backupreview.info’s September rankings are out

Gary Pigott — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:17:34 +0000

This month Central Databank was ranked at #18 in the worldwide enterprise top 25 online backup vendors, and is the highest ranked Irish provider in any category.

Counting the costs of Virtualisation

Gary Pigott — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:25:02 +0000

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 server at no extra cost), the management & maintenance tools can get expensive.

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

Central Databank rises up the managed backup provider rankings

Gary Pigott — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:34:14 +0000

Central Databank debuted on BackupReview.info’s backup service provider top list in June at 20th place. We moved up to 19th place in July and this month we’ve further improved our position by being ranked as the 18th best enterprise online backup service provider worldwide.

New Technical Documentation From Asigra

Gary Pigott — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:03:13 +0000

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. They’re available for download from the Asigra Televaulting product page.

4 Irish companies listed in The Top 75 Online Backup Providers

Gary Pigott — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:08:37 +0000

www.BackupReview.info releases ranking of the top 75 online backup companies, categorized into three sectors: Consumer, SMB and Enterprise; based on predefined standardised criteria, to help users select the appropriate online backup company. Vancouver, BC, Canada – June 1, 2009

Four Irish companies have been listed which sees Central Databank ranked 20^th out of the top 25 Enterprise companies, PutPlace have been listed 25^th in the consumer group and DataBackup.ie and keepITsafe list 24^th and 25^th respectively in the SMB category.

Not surprisingly, Asigra Televaulting (our core platform) is in use by 10 companies in the Enterprise group, most notably the TOP 5.

Click here for more on BackupReview.

Media coverage of the Funambol partnership launch

Gary Pigott — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:54:33 +0000

The launch at the Conrad on Tuesday afternoon is generating significant coverage in the media, both online and off.

So far we’ve been featured on:

Feature: New mobile back-up service launched

Gary Pigott — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:38:21 +0000

Central Data Bank has launched a new online back up service for mobile phone data. The service, which uses software developed by Funambol, was launched in the Conrad Hotel yesterday and our cameras were there to get the low-down on the offering.