The Virtually Perfect Blog Presents:

Acronis Backup and Recovery 10 Online Announcement

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Kimberly Schuerhoff

While local backup and recovery software offers critical protection against a mistakenly deleted file or from a server or workstation crash, it can’t protect against fire, flood or theft. To survive those onslaughts means investing in a redundant offsite strategy in addition to local backup.

As of October 14, 2010 Sublime Solution offers availability of Acronis Backup and Recovery 10 Online – a fast, secure and cost-efficient offsite data protection service from the leader in local and online disaster recovery. This subscription service, when used in conjunction with Acronis Backup & Recovery 10, offers the benefits of a dedicated remote datacenter providing backup & recovery redundancy without the high price tag.

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Unlike other online backup services, Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online does more than just protect your files. It leverages Acronis’ patented disk imaging and Cloud computing technologies to capture files as well as server and workstation operating systems and applications. Backups are stored online in a remote, secure location, fully secured via government-grade encryption. It’s highly cost effective because you only pay one flat rate per machine for the online protection you need.

If you already use Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 software for local backup and recovery of your physical and virtual machines, adding Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online is a snap because the two products are completely integrated. One console seamlessly manages all of your backup and recovery efforts regardless of the data’s actual location.

Features and Benefits

  • Back Up Individual Files or an Entire System Image Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online allows you to back up specific files and folders or an entire system image (including the operating system, applications and configuration information).
  • Restore Anywhere Users can restore backed up files or system images to any server or workstation, eliminating the need to match the underlying hardware before they can begin using them.
  • True Ease of Use Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online leverages Acronis’ highly regarded graphical user interface. Existing Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 users will be immediately productive: it’s the same great console they already know and love. New users will find Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online remarkably easy to configure and use. Even relative novices can create sophisticated, professional backup and recovery plans that pay off with easy recoveries whenever they’re needed.

Key Features

  • Online, Cloud-based Data Protection
    Acronis stores files and system image backups at a remote, secure location to give Windows servers and workstations the additional protection they need against disaster or theft. No additional hardware investment is required.
  • Recover Entire System, Single File or Folder
    Acronis image-based recoveries give you the granularity you need for any kind of recovery. Restore files or complete system images to any server or workstation, eliminating the need to match the underlying hardware.
  • Easy-to-use, Centralized Management
    Administrators can establish online backup policies for workstations and servers using a powerful, wizard-driven user interface. Existing Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 local backup software seamlessly integrates with Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online so you can manage both local and online backups from a single, centralized client console.
  • Flexible Deployment
    Meet today’s data protection challenges and accommodate future needs ‘on the fly’ without costly upgrades. Disk-based backup and disk-based recovery options are available in annual subscriptions; pay one flat rate by machine type for the online service. Because Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online integrates seamlessly with Acronis Backup & Recovery 10, the products can be used together to support any one or any combination of these scenarios:

1) systems that require the two-layer protection of local backups for speed and performance coupled with redundant remote backups to guard against site outages

2) systems that only require local data protection

3) systems that only require online data protection

  • Support for Virtualized Environments
    Acronis supports the systems you have today with agent-less backup and recovery of virtual machines to the cloud. You can store virtual machine (VM) backups in Acronis Online storage when used with Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online for Virtual Machines. Back up data for all Virtual Machines on a VMware® ESX server or Microsoft® Hyper-V server with one Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online for Virtual Machines subscription per host. Virtual Machines are managed in the same way as physical machines from the same management console, including grouping and policy-based management.
  • Government-grade Data Privacy & Security
    High-level data privacy is critical to businesses, and Acronis takes privacy to the maximum level. Government-approved AES-256 Encryption is standard issue with Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online. Moreover, each customer has the option (and is strongly encouraged) to create a unique private key which ensures that only the user can access their business’ information. Neither Acronis nor anyone else will be able to access your data.

Pricing and Availability:

Available immediately from Sublime Solution, pricing starts at:

$49.99 per year for Workstation protection up to 250GB

$499 per year for Server protection up to 1TB

$1199 per year for Virtual Server protection up to 2TB

Optional $100 per machine initial seeding up to 2TB

Optional $280 per machine large scale recovery up to 2TB

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Thanks Ozzie, but not sure you were needed.

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Kimberly Schuerhoff

Ray Ozzie was in a kind of no-win situation that is so commonly faced by many CTOs and Chief Architects inside an organization. Initially, they can go in and basically stand up and say ‘this is what we should be doing’ and everybody listens intently, lots of heads nod – the future looks bright. But then when faced with the actual reality of what they have to work with – or without – often not even having their own real teams. And executive management just go about business as usual. To be fair, Ray did have a couple of teams for a time, but they were transferred to Bob Muglia.

So what will be the effect of Ozzie leaving? Very little, i think. Until Balmer goes, this position should probably remain vacant. The press will talk about an exodus of executives going, but from what we hear, really nothing more than is generally expected. Ray, from what an insider says, was clearly a smart guy, but got very little buy-in for his projects around the halls. Azure, including Office 365 (it closes on leap years), has very much been driven by Muglia and other leaders. In fact, it’s been a long time since I have seen Microsoft so committed to a technology. For every Application, whether internal or external, a decision is made not whether it can be put in Azure, but is there any reason not to.

What’s next for Ozzie? Probably a good time to write a book and sit on some more VC boards.

For Microsoft and its community, Azure seems safe.

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Acronis Disk Director 11 Advanced Server and Workstation Editions

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Kimberly Schuerhoff

On October 14, 2010, Acronis released the latest version of its award winning disk partition and management utility for servers and workstations. Designed to minimize maintenance downtime and provide maximum performance for mission critical applications, Acronis Disk Director 11 is the perfect complement to Acronis Backup and Recovery 10 for a complete data management solution.

Enhanced features in Acronis Disk Director 11 include:

New Operating Systems – Support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008R2.

New Disk Formats – Support for Dynamic and GPT disks.

New Volume Features – Add or break mirrored volumes. Span volumes across multiple physical disks.

New Disk Cloning – Clone disks to replacement hard drives

New Disk Conversion – Convert Basic disks to GPT and vice-versa.

New Management – The ability to perform remote disk management and support for WinPE media

Pricing and Availability

Available for immediate order from Sublime Solution, pricing starts at $79.99 for the Workstation Edition and $609 for the Server Edition.

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vPower Released Today By Veeam

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Kimberly Schuerhoff

Veeam Backup & Replication v5.0 the much anticipated release of is finally here today. Yesterday I and a couple team members were among a select few to get the preview of the 5 major enhancements to be released.

I found it interesting that Veeam mentioned Exchange support as their number one request from end users. The great debate is still on for the pros and cons of virtualizating your Exchange environment as discussed thoroughly by J. Peter Bruzzese and Lee Owns: http://redmondmag.com/Articles/2010/04/01/Virtualizing-Your-Exchange-Environment.aspx?Page=1

Veeam took to heart the request of supporting Exchange and delivered then stepped up a level by supporting pretty much all the major applications AD, SharePoint, Oracle and SQL DB. Veeam now allows File Level/Record Level recovery from any of these files systems.

U-AIR (Universal Application Item Recovery) along with their Sure Backup (verification of your backup) are both big features. The ability for an On-Demand Sandbox for Administrators to bring up their environment at the backup destination in the case of a DR scenario or for testing purposes goes far beyond just a DR tool and become a proactive solution for managing your virtual infrastructure.

Veeam also addressed a couple areas that I believe were important from an archiving standpoint and replication perspective.

Here is a little meat about v5.0 and the difference between the two:

Veeam is now offering 2 different versions Standard & Enterprise

Standard: $599 MSRP per Socket

Includes: Instant VM Recovery, Recovery verification (Manual), IFLR for any file system and Windows guest file systems indexing (Current backups).

Enterprise: $899 MSRP per Socket

Includes: Instant VM Recovery, U-AIR, Recovery Verification (Automated), On-Demand Sandbox, IFLR for any file systems and Windows guess file system indexing (All backups current & archived)

If you’re a current customer and need to upgrade your existing licenses you can find the License Portal here:

http://www.veeam.com/manage_licenses.html

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A miss By a Hosting Provider Does not Denote a Miss for Cloud

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Kimberly Schuerhoff

It’s true, cloud computing stocks may be overvalued, but it’s completely irrational that companies like Salesforce.com get hit because of a revenue warning from a datacenter company. In John Darsie’s article Cloud Computing Bubble Bursts Following Eqinix (EQIX) Warning, he’s insinuating that because of Equinox downgrade, that this is somehow a bad thing for Cloud companies.

To be frank, I think the complete opposite. Traditional hosting providers are going to be put under pressure from the likes of Microsoft and Amazon who are competing directly in their space, as well as competing with SaaS vendors such as Salesforce.com who are looking to provide more back office applications. Microsoft Azure continues to pick up speed and Amazon continues to acquire customers for their ec2 offerings – I see nothing but growth in the cloud space.

A miss by a hosting provider is not a miss for Cloud.

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Veeam and TwinStrata Provide Cost-effective Cloud Storage for VMware Backups

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Kimberly Schuerhoff

The Business Challenge

“It takes roughly 30 minutes to configure
Veeam Backup & Replication and
TwinStrata’s CloudArray software. This
is a fast, easy, and cost-effective solution
for our clients who don’t have the
budget or flexibility for offsite backups
of their VMware environments. It provides
anywhere, anytime accessibility to
data—for both business continuity
and disaster recovery purposes.”

Jason Schuerhoff

Vice President of Sales

Sublime Solution

The Business Challenge

Companies of all sizes consider cloud storage of VMware virtual machine backups for several reasons. First, they might have storage capacity needs beyond their current infrastructures or no off-site disaster recovery capabilities whatsoever.

Furthermore, they might encounter challenges with backup-to-tape scenarios and offsite tape management, or they strive for anywhere, anytime data accessibility for business continuity.

Enter TwinStrata, a pioneer in the cloud SAN storage solutions market that created the first software solution to enhance data protection at a substantial cost savings over traditional off-site storage. Storage clouds provide the availability, security,and performance of local storage without the capital investment and overhead of housing and managing storage.

The Veeam Solution

TwinStrata’s CloudArray software, when used in conjunction with Veeam Backup & Replication, gives organizations access to secure, highly scalable, pay-as-you-go cloud storage for their VMware backups.

Greg Roody, Director of Marketing for TwinStrata, said companies using tape systems or disk-to-disk backup for data protection can select CloudArray as the backup target for Veeam Backup & Replication. “In addition to eliminating the logistics and costs associated with media transport or tape vaulting services, this solution does not require large capital investments for infrastructure expansion,” he explained. “And, since Veeam provides powerful deduplication and near continuous data protection functionality, many companies will experience improved backup speed and reduced storage requirements for backups.”

Greg said CloudArray also provides Veeam customers with a fast and efficient gateway to cloud storage providers of their choice. “This enables cost-effective off-site replication and recovery at a fraction of the cost of traditional two-site solutions,” he added.

Sublime Solution is a consulting company specializing in virtualization implementation initiatives that partners with both Veeam and TwinStrata, in addition to many other companies.

“We are an agnostic infrastructure services organization that works with multiple vendors to find the most efficient and cost-effective solution for each client,” explained Jason Schuerhoff, the company’s Vice President of Sales. “We often recommend the Veeam and TwinStrata strategy because many of our clients don’t have the ability or flexibility to conduct offsite backups for disaster recovery purposes. However, the combination of these two products lets them back up and replicate their virtual infrastructures into the cloud as if they were local, thereby giving them access to the information at any time and from anywhere. Plus, they avoid the cost associated with co-location infrastructures. Most small and mediumsized companies will find this solution pays for itself within 12-18 months.”

The Results

Provides new levels of business agility - Veeam Software and TwinStrata provide new levels of business agility, efficiency, and cost management for the creation and storage of VMware backups. The combined solution provides companies with the availability, security, and performance characteristics of local data storage— available anytime, anywhere.

Ensures data security, high availability, and portability - To ensure data security and privacy, TwinStrata’s CloudArray compresses and encrypts data prior to transporting it to cloud storage. Since CloudArray runs as a virtual machine in VMware ESX(i), users can configure it in either high availability or hot standby mode for added availability and resiliency. In addition, Cloud storage is portable and can be restored at any recovery site.

Improves efficiency and reduces operational costs - The combination of Veeam Backup & Replication and CloudArray storage reduces the amount of on-premise infrastructure needed to accommodate growth for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes, thereby reducing capital expenditures. CloudArray’s unlimited capacity enables companies to “pay as they go” for storage, rather than overpaying for space they don’t need.

To Learn More Visit Veeam

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Look to the Clouds For All New Acronis B&R 10 Online

Posted on August 31, 2010 by Kimberly Schuerhoff

Acronis

Acronis®, a leading provider of easy-to-use backup, recovery and security solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, is announcing today Acronis Backup & Recovery® 10 Online. This online backup and recovery solution offers the advantages of a secondary redundant data store without a substantial upfront investment.

The product will be shown for the first time at the Acronis booth #1125 at VMworld in San Francisco August 30 – September 2.

Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online answers the need for cost effective online redundant data storage for backup and recovery. IT administrators can use it to recover files, folders or complete systems.

While on-site local backup software like Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 provides the benefits of high performance backups and recoveries in the event of specific infrastructure failure, the new Acronis solution enables IT organizations to recover quickly and completely from a secure cloud computing environment in the wake of a full data center disaster or outage, without building a dedicated and redundant offsite storage facility. It includes support for mixed virtual and physical computing environments found in many of today’s businesses.

With this product announcement, the Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 family becomes one of the first data protection solutions to offer agent-less backup for virtual machines (eliminating agents reduces repetitive administration tasks). Moreover, it:

  • Has minimal impact on management overhead, since the same Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 management console allows for control of both online and local backups—for both physical and virtual machines.
  • Recovers individual files or whole system images so organizations have the disaster recovery flexibility they need.
  • Provides flexible retention periods depending on customer’s backup and archiving policies.
  • Protects backup data through AES-256 data encryption and user authentication.
  • Offers an initial seeding option for customers with large amounts of data, where the backup is placed on a hard drive and sent to our data center for uploading. Similarly, in the event of a large server outage, Acronis will load a server’s backups onto an external hard drive and ship it to the customer as part of its Large Scale Recovery option.

The service is available in an annual subscription basis and is licensed per machine. For pricing and availability, please contact Sublime Solution at 877-273-1200 or sales@sublimesolution.net.

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Winds of Change: Acronis B&R 10 “A Power Ballad on Recovery”

Posted on August 17, 2010 by Kimberly Schuerhoff

As an Acronis Gold partner we experienced the release of Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 the predecessor of Acronis True Image. Myself along with my team field calls on a daily basis with complaints about the new version. We have received so much feedback I thought I would take a moment and share a different point of view.

Acronis True Image 9.5 was a simple easy solution for imaging and restoring your entire system. Its feature and functionality were well placed in the SMB area. Anyone from a site administrator to Joe the owner of a pizza joint could install and configure the software. It was widely known throughout the community as a valid competitor to Symantec’s Backup Exec. However, in the medium to enterprise business area True Image lacked some of the key ingredients to play on the same field as Symantec. i.e reporting, remote management (that worked) and group management (that worked).

Midyear in 2009 Acronis released the long awaited Acronis Backup & Recovery 10, with enhanced management capabilities and scalability from 1-3,000 servers. Acronis did a great job with the GUI. When you look at the competition the Acronis interface is far better than the rest out in the market. They built a single foundation for the rest of their technology to sit on moving forward. Now, like any 1.0 version they have had their hiccups and as an organization did their best to mitigate those issues and release fixes within a reasonable time frame.

Fast forward 1 year. Sublime Solution as a company has seen a dramatic drop in support cases and increased customer satisfaction. Today 80% of the support calls are due to miss configuration or installation issues. Acronis has received feedback on this and has implemented steps such as: reinstating wizard driven installation process (in the works) and partnering up with their VARS to offer “Acronis Jumpstarts” to assist in the install & Configuration process.

Most people fear change and are holding on to the old version of Acronis True Image. With the new version of Acronis Backup and Recovery 10 you have an entirely new look and feel, along with the features and functionality to give any true enterprise DR solution a run for its money. Acronis Backup and Recovery 10 provides you a single pain of glass to manage both your physical and virtual infrastructure for both server and workstations. It’s ability to convert .TIB (True Image Backup file format) into a virtual file format has provided a new level of flexibility giving end-users the ability to restore pretty much anytime anywhere scenario.

My point of view is that Acronis had to take the necessary steps to compete in the enterprise area and like any growing company they along with their customers have experienced some growing pains. However, I believe they are positioned as a much more mature solution that can manage 1 server or workstation with their standalone or 3,000 with their Advanced Server version.

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Veeam Announces Veeam ONE for VMware

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Kimberly Schuerhoff

Veeam
Veeam Announces Veeam ONE for VMware – a Single Solution for VMware Management

Veeam ONE Provides Comprehensive Solution to Optimize Performance, Configuration and Utilization of Enterprise VMware Environments

VMworld 2010 Conference

COLUMBUS, Ohio–Veeam Software, innovative provider of data protection, disaster recovery and systems management solutions for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today introduced a single comprehensive solution for managing the performance, configuration and utilization of VMware environments. The Veeam ONE Solution™ for VMware management provides one convenient solution for monitoring, capacity planning, change management, and reporting and chargeback.

“Veeam ONE offers the benefits of a single-vendor solution, but without the one-size-fits-all mentality of some competing products,” explained Ratmir Timashev, Veeam President and CEO. “As server virtualization has matured to support mission-critical workloads, management must also mature. Only Veeam offers a single solution that takes into account varying customer requirements and scenarios. For customers using Microsoft System Center, Veeam offers the nworks Management Pack™ Plus, leveraging and extending the management framework in which customers have already invested. For those using HP Operations Manager, we offer the nworks Smart Plug-in™ Plus. And for other monitoring environments, we offer Veeam Monitor™ Plus. Customers are free to choose the ONE that’s right for them.”

In addition to monitoring, capacity planning and change management, all versions of Veeam ONE include business-oriented monitoring and reporting on resource usage and performance by department, organizational unit or server type – clearly showing stakeholders how the virtual infrastructure supports business priorities and meets service-level agreements.

Choose the ONE That’s Right for You

Veeam ONE is available in four versions to accommodate each organization’s particular monitoring environment:

1. The nworks Management Pack Plus is ideal for organizations using Microsoft System Center. As a native management pack, it integrates seamlessly and provides scalable, fault-tolerant and agentless VMware monitoring and management directly in the System Center console. It includes the Veeam nworks Management Pack and nworks PRO Pack™,

Veeam Reporter™ and Veeam Business View™.

2. The nworks Smart Plug-in Plus is a native solution for organizations using HP Operations Manager. It publishes VMware performance, events, configuration, state and topology directly into Operations Manager, eliminating the need for an additional console (and training), while giving users a common view across physical and virtual infrastructures. It includes the Veeam nworks Smart Plug-in, Veeam Reporter and Veeam Business View.

3. Veeam Monitor Plus is a framework-independent monitoring and reporting solution for VMware. It provides a cohesive view of the entire virtual infrastructure, alerting users to performance issues and providing diagnostic data and built-in advice to enable quick problem resolution and expert tuning. Veeam Monitor Plus can be integrated with other monitoring or ticketing systems via SNMP. It includes Veeam Monitor, Veeam Reporter and Veeam Business View.

4. Veeam Monitor Plus Free Edition is a free version of Veeam Monitor Plus, offering limited functionality at no cost for smaller companies with budget constraints. It includes Veeam Monitor Free Edition, Veeam Reporter Free Edition and Veeam Business View.

“Veeam ONE fills a market gap by providing a single solution to key VMware management needs,” said Jason Schuerhoff, VicePresident of Sales for Sublime Solution. “No matter which variety a customer chooses, it’s an enterprise-strength solution that’s also easy to deploy, making it an ideal choice for both large and small VMware deployments. We recommend Veeam to our customers because with Veeam, they get a single pane of glass to manage the virtual infrastructure. Adding the reporting capability to monitoring allows our clients to go from reactive to proactive. Veeam ONE fills in the rest of the picture and provides a true end-to-end solution.”

Pricing and Availability

Veeam ONE is available immediately. North American MSRP starts at $550 per socket. More information is available at www.veeam.com/one. Veeam will be demonstrating all versions of Veeam ONE at VMworld in San Francisco, August 31 – Sept 2, Booth 413.

For more information visit www.sublimesolution.net or call us at 877-273-1200

View Original Press by Veeam

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New Sheriff in Town: VMTurbo Steps Up Virtualization Management

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Kimberly Schuerhoff

Sublime prides its self as taking an agnostic approach when partnering up with solutions based around virtualization. As a smaller more nibble partner we don’t have a large investment in one piece of technology to the tune that our judgment is clouded.

We spend a lot of time researching and analyzing our core technology offerings to ensure we are delivering the best solution possible. Sublime early on in the game identified VKernel as a nice add-on to any growing virtual infrastructure. With its built-in reporting and add on products it provides you a glimpse into possible capacity challenges. It also would identify over & under utilized VM’s/resources. VKernel has flip flopped back and forth for 2 years now trying to focus on a solution to go to market with. Reminds me of the “throw spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks” go to market strategy. In the end they seem to have a bundle of tools which are viewed by most as nice to have solutions.

Most IT organizations are still feeling the squeeze of the economy and are looking to do more with less. VMware, VKernel and a handful of other solutions all serve up information for you to act on for managing your environment. At the end of the day these solutions still require man power and resources to tackle the action items identified from these solutions.

In comes the new sheriff in town VMTurbo. A new piece of technology based out of NY backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. VMTurbo is really broken down into three major areas:

• Virtual Datacenter Automation

• Virtual Infrastructure Health and Performance Management

• Real-Time Virtual Infrastructure Right-Sizing

VMTurbo goes a step further than VKernel & VMware and will actually re mediate issues. It does this by treating resources like commodities (buyers and sellers) and if resources get to expensive on one host it will move the VM to another host…it is like DRS on Steroids.

We are talking about a solution they identifies, notifies and takes action. Truly providing you a solution to assist in managing a larger virtual infrastructure with less man power. Keep an eye out for these guys: www.vmturbo.com

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