Archive for February 2011

Law Firm Successfully Handles Disaster Recovery Trial by Fire

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

Properly planning, testing and documenting whether your organization’s  systems and data can be recovered in the event of a disaster is a best practice we heartily espouse here at i365. So it is always great to showcase another customer that is doing things right when it comes to disaster recovery and data protection.

Networkworld recently wrote this great article about EVault customer, law firm Marshall, Dennehey, Warner, Coleman & Goggin. The firm was able to avoid disaster when the use of their New York office was knocked out of commission for two weeks due to an electrical fire in the building’s basement.

Fortunately for the firm, they had a disaster recovery plan in place. A plan they had tested. As John Brooks, manager of network services at Marshall, Dennehey, states in the article:

“We had tested the recovery of our SQL databases and our Exchange databases, and we fully documented everything. When the fire happened, we were ahead of the game. We knew exactly what to do, and that’s why we were able to recover so quickly.”

The firm was able to restore data from the primary vault at their Philadelphia headquarters and make it available to attorneys and staff  from the New York office in a matter of hours. It was literally “a trial by fire” of Marshall, Dennehey’s EVault backup and recovery system, and it came through with flying colors! Just goes to show how important it is to plan and test if you can recover your data in the time required.

How prepared is your organization in the event of a disaster? Have you tested your plan?

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Terry Time: Magic Quadrant Connects to the Cloud

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

2010 was a great year for i365 – the first full year executing our EVault Cloud-Connected storage solutions strategy. Our on-premise, edge, and Cloud data protection solutions, often deployed in combination as Cloud-Connected “hybrids,” are helping over 32,000 organizations protect and access their business data. 2011 is off to a great start too. The new EVault Cloud-Connected Service Provider program is running in high gear. Our channel is ramping fast. We have some great new product announcements on the horizon.

And here’s an important recent development I’d like to share: we just earned our first placement on the Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Enterprise Disk-Based Backup/Recovery. Previous versions of this MQ focused on legacy, tape-centric, on-premise data protection solutions.  In this version, Gartner recognized that the balance between tape and disk has tipped and that disk-based solutions have to be included in the Magic Quadrant analysis. They are also just beginning to acknowledge the role of the Cloud in enterprise data protection. But even more interesting to us is that Gartner included the SMB-focused EVault in an Enterprise round up – evidence that the benefits of our professional grade solutions for the SMB/SME are recognized at the enterprise level too.

i365 was positioned in the “Niche” quadrant, in which Gartner places those companies that focus on a sub-segment of the market, or on specific use cases. In our case, we believe it is because we focus on the cloud-connected segment of the market that values our on-premise backup and recovery software/appliances coupled with Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery services.  We see this as validation that we’re breaking new ground – and that our position reflects the beginning of a major shift in the data protection market.

We know that Cloud-Connected data protection has not yet moved to the mainstream within the enterprise market. However we are seeing the signs of adoption of our storage services in this market and we have some Cloud-Connected enterprise customers that are doing great things with our hybrid solutions. As we continue to innovate and as the adoption of Cloud-based storage services moves upmarket (just as disk-based protection has) we look forward to moving to leader status. We are doubling down on our efforts to bring our next generation of data protection and availability solutions for virtualized environments to market. We continue to increase the scalability of our vaults and improve the manageability of our solutions. And we are dedicated to delivering the best support, managed and hosted services to our customers – small and large.

Gartner highlights our market as a niche today – but Cloud-Connected storage solutions will be mainstream tomorrow.  And we are leading the way.

Posted by Terry Cunningham

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New MSP Partner in Finland – Welcome Nevtor OY

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

We are proud to announce our newest  i365 Alliance Partner, Nevtor Oy, a privately-owned managed service provider (MSP) and high-level consultancy company operating in Finland and the Baltics. Nevtor offers IT outsourcing, data management, hosting and remote backup services. They have a very strong knowledge of VMware and Microsoft technologies and their services also include customer training on these technologies.

This partnership is a new step for i365 in the region as we expand our reach within Europe. Nevtor, which will offer an online backup service based on EVault technology, chose i365 as their trusted partner because of our expertise, flexibility, proven technology and years of experience delivering multi-tenant solutions for MSPs. The ability to also offer customers an option to protect critical systems via the bare metal backup and restore capabilities of EVault System Restore was an added bonus.

Overall, the partnership will allow Nevtor to  leverage their existing infrastructure investment to provide best-of-breed Cloud backup and recovery services to their customers.

Welcome to the Alliance Program.

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Law Firm Uses Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Service To Avert Disaster

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

Protecting systems and data via Cloud-based disaster recovery services has always been a hot topic on this blog. And we’ve noted in the past that disk backup,virtualization & the Cloud is making enterprise-class DR services more affordable for resource-constrained organizations as previously, the only options were either setting up a costly second data center and/or storing backup tapes offsite, and then crossing your fingers you can restore both critical servers AND data quickly (and if at all)  in the event of a site disaster.

So it’s great to be able to cite a real world examples of a company not only practicing what we’ve been preaching… but also seeing it work as planned.

This week we issued a press release about how law firm Aldrich Bonnefin & Moore (AB&M) used the EVault Remote Disaster Recovery cloud-based managed DR service to get their critical systems & data (and business) back up and running offsite after they experienced a site-wide power outage:

AB&M’s 24-hour RTO was tested when a complex-wide power outage struck immediately after EVault Remote Disaster Recovery Service was implemented. Without power, AB&M’s employees were unable to access important systems and client data. After declaring a disaster to i365 on a Friday afternoon, AB&M relied on rapid remote access to state-of-the-art EVault data centers to access an online copy of its critical data and applications. The dedicated EVault support staff had AB&M’s virtual systems up and running within 10 hours—ready for business opening the following Monday.

AB&M had the foresight to leverage the Cloud to avert disaster and keep their business running. What’s your RTO for key systems and data in the event of a disaster? Are you prepared like AB&M was?

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