January 23rd, 2012 by Joseph Hand By Joseph Hand
Starting with Windows 2003, Microsoft shipped its OS with this new and exciting set of services. The Volume shadow-Copy Services, or VSS, were Microsoft’s answer to system, volume, and application consistency.
Prior to VSS, there was File Level Backup, which presented a number of challenges to try to overcome, open files being the biggest. When a backup of a system starts, it is a serial process starting at point A and progressing through to point B. With a Full backup, this is accepted and understood. With an incremental, it is a harmful side effect as even though you want to back up the files that have changed or are new, you still have to traverse the entire file system to discover which files to backup. Next is the open file issue. If a file is locked by the OS or an application, the backup process cannot back it up without typically first loading some kind of open file agent that performs some magic of its own to make that happen. These open file agents add overhead and often end up causing more problems than they solve. The backup software will typically backup the file system, but complain about open files and not be able to back them up without it. Performing an Exchange backup and SQL backup had their own agents that went through a process to quiese the data and present it to the backup software. Read more »
January 10th, 2012 by Joseph Hand Ok, so Cloud is the buzzword of the day. I get it. Everyone is headed there. All vendors of disks, applications that touch the storage world, mainstream line of business applications, etc… All going cloud! Today, I can put my entire infrastructure into the Cloud. I even saw an IP based Phone company with a cloud offering. Now, when my phone rings, it’s coming from the cloud! Cloud-based applications, cloud-based storage, cloud-based server backup, EVERYTHING seems to be cloud-based! Read more »
January 4th, 2012 by Joseph Hand Part 3 of a 3 part Blog…
Gathering my thoughts for this third of three Server Backup blog posts to mirror our top three technologies, I was trying to come up with cool titles. The funny thing that kept sneaking back in were the things that everyone wants, but can never find. In part 1, The Holy Grail: who wouldn’t want to eliminate their RTO window and have data and applications up and running quickly? I describe it as the Holy Grail simply because no other technology can offer this and you could search your whole life for it and not see it… that is, until you find AppAssure. Read more »
December 22nd, 2011 by Joseph Hand In my best movie trailer voice… “In a world… where critical servers fail… One Technology… One recovery product… Stands alone…” Okay, a bit dramatic, I agree. But, having been in this industry for the last 15 or so years, and having worked with some of the largest companies as they’ve tried to tackle their organization’s server backup and recovery needs, I have seen a lot, used many different products, and played with almost all of the competition. With this said, after 2.5 years after coming to AppAssure, I am still amazed at what this product can do.
In this and the next two blog posts, I am going to describe our top 3 technologies built into AppAssure’s Backup and Replication product. I will cover what the features are and what they do, and give examples of how they are used to dramatically reduce the time it takes to recover data… but not only data… Good data! Read more »
December 15th, 2011 by Joseph Hand IT workers, managers, and executives are starting to come to terms with the fact that legacy backup has become too costly to maintain. Although it is entrenched in most shops, it is also very complex and in most cases inadequate to handle the challenges of an evolving world. And while Virtual has helped in many areas like rack space, cooling, resource utilization, power consumption, and overall management of servers and applications, it has also added stress points to the server backup infrastructure.
Managing tape today, with the growth of the environments being protected, has made it inefficient for backup. Don’t get me wrong… tape has a place in the future of IT, just not for backup. For backup, storing the same data over and over again creates too much data to manage. It also has limitations for quick recovery. Moreover, tapes take significant resources to maintain and manage and they require inefficient mechanisms to ensure recoverability. And then there is that offsite issue. Move tapes to another location on a daily basis or pay someone to store them for you… either way, it is expensive. Having said that, tape is still an excellent medium for long term archive where it is very predictable and controllable. Read more »
December 5th, 2011 by AppAssure Software 
Welcome back to AppAssure blog. We are offering you to review this top articles:
1. The cloud security checklist
published on November 29, full story: infoworld.com
Think your data will be safe in the cloud? Here are six tough questions for your cloud service provider.
2. Cisco sees clouds in the data center’s future
published on November 30, full story: networkworld.com
Global cloud computing traffic will grow 12-fold from now to 2015, according to a new Cisco study
Read more »
December 1st, 2011 by AppAssure Software 
The hottest thing in data centers right now is virtualization. The new technology enables you to run several operating systems within a single physical environment, giving you essentially two or more servers in one.
Why should you go to virtualization?
The standard way for data processing was one application, one server. This way, you made sure your applications ran in a clean environment, and one application didn’t impact another. If a problem developed, it was easy to debug and fix. This works fine except for the fact that with today’s modern computers, you end up using a small amount of a server’s capacity. Read more »
December 1st, 2011 by AppAssure Software 
It’s a fact of life—disasters happen. Think about this scenario: Let’s assume the river next to your office rises and floods your building. Not only is your carpet ruined, but your primary server has spent hours below murky flood waters. Your server is a complete loss—a year’s worth of your company’s data has been wiped out.
Luckily, you made a full backup of everything on your server, so all you need to do is retrieve the backups and restore them, right? Hopefully, it will be easy to get things back up and running in no time.
But then again, it may be more difficult than you think.
Read more »
November 28th, 2011 by AppAssure Software 
Welcome back to AppAssure blog, where you can always get useful news that help keep your data safe:
1. FBI’s holiday online shopping tips
published on November 21, full story: networkworld.com
IT managers are worried about corporate network security since personal devices may face a greater risk of being hacked during shopping forays. Here are some tips everyone can use to avoid becoming a victim of cyber fraud
2. Cloud increases licensing complexity, warns SAP user group
published on November 22, full story: computerworlduk.com
The move to cloud computing is creating headaches for SAP users, who are struggling to get their heads around the complex licensing structure that a hybrid environment entails Read more »
November 21st, 2011 by AppAssure Software 
If you want to know the most interesting things that happened in server-related web last week, this top articles will be helpful:
1. Microsoft to preview Windows 8 Embedded in first quarter 2012
published on November 14, IDG News Service, full story: infoworld.com
Microsoft will start allowing developers to preview Windows 8 Embedded in the first quarter of next year, with plans to eventually release its embedded computing products in the quarters following the Windows 8 desktop version launch
2. Microsoft to streamline Windows 8’s patch process
published on November 15, full story: computerworld.com
Tweaks to updating, rebooting of patched PCs will improve security, say experts Read more »
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