Top 10 Best Practices of Backup and Replication for VMware and Hyper-V

May 16th, 2012 by Joseph Hand

Too often I hear about VMware Admins struggling with backup and recovery. Some of these struggles are related to understanding how snapshots related to backup, preparing for offsite data storage, and being prepared to recover virtual machines en masse or on different hypervisors.

For those admins that who are getting started with virtualization backup and recovery or who might be struggling with it, fortunately David Davis, vExpert and virtualization evangelist has put together a great new whitepaper entitled “Top 10 Best Practices of Backup and Replication for VMware and Hyper-V”. It covers the steps you should take to prevent most of these common problems and I believe it can help save VMware Admins a lot of heartache. Read more »

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Thanks for a Fantastic 2011 to Our Partners and Customers!

February 17th, 2012 by Joseph Hand

Since the beginning, we have set the stage for record growth based on the fact that we created a software product that took into account that the traditional and legacy applications in our space all have shortcomings that we can address easily. With this approach of trying to solve actual problems, it was no surprise that the customers would come… and come they did.

AppAssure has created an innovative product that stands apart from the rest of the backup tools on the market today. These groundbreaking backup technologies were the first of their kind in the industry, solving real problems our customers face. We got here by consistently listening to our customers and partners and always exceeding in delivering beyond their expectations. We owe our remarkable success to our customers, partners, and to hiring the best talent in the industry to the AppAssure team. Read more »

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I Need A Place To Store My Data… A Storage Primer.

February 15th, 2012 by Joseph Hand

Remember the old days? I mean years ago. You would decide to type a document on your shiny new computer, so you went to the system prompt and typed in the name of the executable and viola! The application came up, and by navigating an elaborate menu system, you were able to type and format a document. When you were done, and wanted to save that document, you stuck a floppy disk into the drive and saved the document to the disk.

Today, things have changed a bit. Have you ever heard of Moore’s Law? A quote from Wikipedia: “Moore’s law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware whereby the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.” This translates into the processor speed doubles in performance. The same applies to storage. The disks get bigger and bigger. The only issue here is the Moore’s Law principles are the same for the amount and size of the data.

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New Toy… ZAGG Bluetooth Keyboard for iPad

February 15th, 2012 by Joseph Hand

This is my first blog post from my iPad using my new ZAGG case and Bluetooth keyboard. I also, figuring this single device may liberate me from my 12 pound laptop, downloaded the new productivity apps from Apple. This post is being written in Pages. So far, so good.

One of the cool things I am looking forward to is the use of iCloud to store documents so I have the ability to add something to my iPad and have it magically appear in my laptop and phone.

This iPad was a gift I received from a couple of friends that I did some website work for around the holidays in 2010. It is an iPad 2 WiFi 64GB in Black. As well as my typical apps that I use for work, there is an abundance of musical selections, mostly classic rock… some games, social media tools, and whatever the current audiobook du jour is.

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Happy Valentine’s Day!

February 14th, 2012 by Joseph Hand
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Today is a day of love and we have to admit that we love our customers, we love our partners and we love the technology community. We love you!

And if you love AppAssure, please click here and then “Like” us on Facebook! :)

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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What Would You Do With The Money A Super Bowl Ad Costs?

February 6th, 2012 by Joseph Hand

The going rate for an ad in this year’s Super Bowl (where the Giant’s will make history again Winking smile ) is 3.5 Million dollars for 30 seconds. THREE POINT FIVE MILLION DOLLARS!!! This got me thinking of what would I be able to do with that kind of budget as a company of any size…

Let’s take my company size for instance. Roughly 230 people working hard to bring our product to the market. Pretty interesting thing to ponder… so here goes…

  1. If we paid for our own software, with the 30 or so servers we have today, we’d be able to pay for 466 years of annual maintenance.
  2. If we wanted to give each employee a bonus as an equal cut of the 3.5M, it would be $15,217.39 each.
  3. We could send 25 of our employees to get their MBAs.
  4. We could raise the number of TVs hanging on the wall from about 25 to 3500, making it very difficult to work…
  5. We could buy about 700 new servers.
  6. We could pay off every employee’s student loans.
  7. We could send direct mail to every company in the US about 20 times.
  8. We could buy lunch for the whole company for 26 straight weeks.

How about the average IT Consumer? My guess if you gave your IT department 3.5 Million Dollars, they’d find something to do with it Winking smile

What would you do with 3.5 Million Dollars? Let us know below in the comments section.

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Joe’s Top 5 – 5 Reasons Why You Need Replication

February 2nd, 2012 by Joseph Hand

Replication has always been one of those technologies that people run scared from…

The main reason is usually based on cost. When you think of replication, your mind drifts to solutions that replicate from one disk frame to another using block level technology, or products that replicate files from one host to another. The vision that likely comes to mind is one of very expensive broadband connections for these products to work properly. The fact is that today, there are a bunch of products on the market that got smarter with your data and bandwidth.

Technologies like compression and data deduplication now factor in, reducing the actual amount of data that goes over the wire. The trend to follow in replication is now merging into data protection in such a way that the two become seamless.

Here are my Top 5 reasons you need to take a fresh look at replication to enhance your overall Business Continuance strategy. Read more »

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Microsoft Volume Shadow-Copy Service (VSS) – The Basics…

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, Windows Server backup, Hyper-V backup, SQL backup had their own agents that went through a process to quiese the data and present it to the backup software. Read more »

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Cloudy Server Backup with a Chance Of… well… Cloud?

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, VMware backup, Hyper-V backup, Xenserver backup. 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 »

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Universal Recovery or “The Lost City of Atlantis” Part 3 of 3

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 »

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