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Defining the Cloud

Josh Hoffman
We were fortunate enough to be able to spend last week at the Windows Connections conference in Las Vegas. One of the greatest advantages of conferences like that is the ability to interact with so many experts in one place: we heard directory services expert Sean Deuby speak about Active Directory protection and recovery; Michael Noel talk about SharePoint best practices as well as SharePoint file recovery; Paul Randal present on SQL Server performance, and so many others as well.

We also had the chance to listen to – and speak with – Steve Riley, a product manager at Amazon Web Services. Steve gave a talk entitled “Fear the Cloud No More”, in which he helped to define what cloud computing really is, what it offers us, and what we need to think about before diving head first into cloud computing and storage. We also had a chance to interview Steve on camera, and ask him a number of questions about the role of cloud computing in application protection. Look for that video on our website very soon.

In the meantime, be sure to check out Steve’s presentation, which he’s so graciously shared. And send us your questions! E-mail leadgeek@appassure.com, or find us on twitter at http://twitter.com/appassure.

Industry News

Presentations from Windows Connections
We’ve spent the past week at the Windows Connections show in Las Vegas, and as usual, the content has been outstanding. One of the best talks we heard was the keynote delivered by Steve Riley, a product manager at Amazon Web Services. Titled “Fear the Cloud No More”, Steve sought (successfully I think) to demystify cloud computing, and guide the audience through the benefits – and concerns – when it comes to moving our data storage and computing power into the cloud.

Five questions to ask before adopting cloud storage
Cloud data storage is becoming an increasingly appealing option for many IT infrastructures. However, because cloud storage is relatively new, most enterprise data storage managers are unsure of what questions to ask potential service providers to determine how storage clouds will impact their environment.

Five Common Backup and Recovery Mistakes
Server backup and recovery isn’t rocket science, but you would be surprised by the number of IT organizations that can’t get it right. Here are five of the most common mistakes.

Backup in a snap: A guide to snapshot technologies
Snapshot technologies are commonly used to enhance data backup systems and dramatically shorten RTOs and RPOs. But you need to know how snapshot implementations can vary, and what those differences could mean to your environment.

Is the future of storage scale up or scale out?
Hu Yoshida is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. This past week on his blog, he tackled the notion of “scale up vs. scale out.” The final answer remains to be seen, but the discussion raises some interesting questions.

News from AppAssure

The Contest Continues!
For every trial and utility you download, you’ll be entered into a drawing for a FREE 2 TERABYTE Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. We have 7 available downloads (AppAssure Backup & Replication, DocRetriever, MailRetriever, DocRetriever Lite, MailRetriever Lite, Exchange Observer, and the Hyper-V Toolset) so that’s 7 possible entries for you between November 1 and November 30, 2009.

What Google Price Cuts Mean for Cloud Storage
We’ve all been watching the trend in storage pricing for some time now, so it’s not a huge surprise when Google announced price cuts for users who want to purchase extra storage for Google services like Gmail and Picassa. Google’s extra storage is limited to their services (so it doesn’t really support applications like cloud backup of business data), it’s really only a matter of time, isn’t it?

Finally this week, Microsoft has announced the release of the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator. This surprisingly comprehensive tool aims to help administrators plan your Exchange deployment based on your organization’s size, usage, and requirements — definitely a must-have for any Exchange admin’s toolbox.

Have a great week,

Josh
AppAssure Software for Exchange continuously protects and monitors the health of your Exchange data stores and allows administrators to quickly search, recover, and analyze mailbox content. With AppAssure Software for Exchange you can backup and restore individual email messages, folders, or mailboxes to a live Exchange server or directly to a PST, thereby solving some of your most costly and time consuming challenges.
AppAssure Software for SQL is an enterprise SQL server backup and disaster recovery software solution developed to assure comprehensive protection - including system and user databases, SQL binaries and the server - making it possible to restore both servers and databases in just minutes.
AppAssure Software for Hyper-V is an enterprise-class backup and disaster recovery software solution designed for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments. AppAssure Software for Hyper-V supports both host and guest level backup methodologies while delivering accelerated backups, fast local recoveries and disaster recovery, all-in-one solution.
AppAssure Software for SharePoint is an enterprise backup and disaster recovery software solution developed to assure comprehensive protection - including front-end servers, SQL servers and the web servers - making it possible to restore both the entire SharePoint environment, individual SharePoint servers and databases and individual SharePoint objects in just minutes.
AppAssure Software for Windows Servers is an application-aware, server-based backup and disaster recovery software solution that delivers fast application backups, fast local recoveries and off-site disaster recovery, all-in-one solution.
Small businesses typically have limited IT resources and smaller staffs than large enterprises, but with AppAssure Software for Windows Small Business Server they have full access to the same powerful server backup and recovery software tools found in larger organizations.
AppAssure Software for VMware is an enterprise-class backup and disaster recovery software solution designed for Windows workloads running VMware virtual environments. With one price for an unlimited number of guests, AppAssure Software delivers accelerated backups, fast local recoveries and disaster recovery, all-in-one solution.
AppAssure Software for Windows Desktops (VDI) simplifies and automates backup and disaster recovery processes, while giving an administrator the ability to remotely monitor and manage large VDI deployments or geographically distributed machines from a single console.
DocRetriever for SharePoint dramatically simplifies the process of restoring individual documents, sites, sub-sites and folders. SharePoint Administrators no longer need to spend countless hours rebuilding your entire production database, or worry about deploying a temporary SharePoint recovery farm, just to recover an individual document or list item.
MailRetriever for Exchange is an affordable and easy-to-use e-mail recovery software package for browsing, recovering, searching, exporting, and analyzing e-mail and mailbox content directly from any unmounted Microsoft Exchange Data Store (EDB). MailRetriever for Exchange can even open and repair corrupted EDB files. With MailRetriever for Exchange, you are never more than just a few clicks away from recovering a message or mailbox. MailRetriever for Exchange eliminates the need for time-consuming full-server and EDB restores for message recovery.
For individual message or mailbox recovery, AppAssure Software and Microsoft Storage Solutions have partnered together to deliver MailRetriever for DPM, enabling Microsoft Exchange administrators around the world to gain efficient and economical access to message-level recovery.
AppAssure´s Backup software for Kaseya lets you recover from any server failure to physical or virtual machines in minutes, backup and recover either locally or offsite, and provide offsite DR to customers with low bandwidth through integrated deduplication and replication.
AppAssure Backup & Disaster Recovery Software is best way to back up and protect your VMware virtual machines. It doesn´t just support your virtual environment - rather; it leverages VMware ESX, ESXi and vSphere to provide a whole new level of protection for all your virtualized applications, services and desktops. AppAssure Software lets you meet your VMware backup RTO and RPO objectives for less.