Posted by Laura Shafer on Wed, Jul 28, 2010 @ 02:43 PM
You may not know about it, but ShadowProtect comes with a handy utility called ShadowProtect ImageManager™. It comes with most versions of ShadowProtect, except ShadowProtect IT Edition™ and ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange™.
ShadowProtect ImageManager works with servers and with desktops and has several cool features that can really help you manage your backup image files. If you're taking several backups each day, as you should, these backup image files can start eating up your disk space pretty fast, unless you have a way to manage them.
That's why ShadowProtect ImageManager allows you to automatically consolidate point-in-time backup image files. Once you set it up, it can collapse all your daily images into one "daily" file. Then, each week it can collapse those "daily" files into one "weekly" file. And then it will collapse those "weekly" files into a "monthly" file. This helps minimize disk space. This is why we recommend that you set your ShadowProtect backups to perform "continuous incrementals." Then it's easy for ShadowProtect ImageManager to help you save disk space and collapse those incremental files each day, week and month.
In
addition, ShadowProtect ImageManager will verify and re-verify your backup images. This way you can be certain all of your backups are in a good state, just in case you need them to recover your system.
Finally, you can also set up ShadowProtect ImageManager to track the status of your backups and notify you in the event of a backup job success -- or failure. Now you can know right away if something goes wrong.
Earlier this year, StorageCraft also introduced a new version of ShadowProtect ImageManager, called ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™. It's designed specifically for servers and has two additional features - HeadStart Restore™ and image verification. In our next blog article, we'll spend some time explaining those features and its additional per-server licensing requirements.
Posted by Glen Thomson on Mon, Jan 25, 2010 @ 11:50 AM
Sean Furman is fishing for a perfect blue fin tuna. When he’s not running his business, STF Consulting, Furman is out on the open water, usually more than 50 miles out in the ocean off the tip of Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Very early in the morning on a recent Tuesday, he and his crew left the dock at Seabright, where he moors his 26-foot boat, Painless, and headed out to sea. They saw much more than tuna.
“There is a lot of life out there. There are dolphins whales everywhere,” says Furman. “They were so friendly, they’d come right up to the boat.”
During fishing season, Furman takes his boat out several times a month. He says he’s even arranged it so the birth of his first child doesn’t upset his fishing schedule. “I planned my child’s birth around fishing,” says Furman. “The baby is due in the off season so there’s no conflict with fishing and I can be 100 % focused on what my wife wants me to do.”
Until the baby arrives, Furman is in search of perfection. “I’m always looking for that trophy fish and I’m looking for trophy customers,” says Furman.
STF Consulting is a managed service provider (MSP) in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, offering IT services to businesses in the central part of the state. STF Consulting oversees approximately 100 servers and 550 workstations in 40 businesses in the area.
Furman says he is always looking for the best tools to round out his MSP offering for customers. He uses solutions like those from Level Platforms to monitor laptops to make sure all systems are “go” as well as the StorageCraft ShadowProtect line of award-winning backup, disaster recovery and migration software to keep his customers’ data available.
“ShadowProtect IT Edition is worth its weight in gold,” says Furman. “We also use ShadowProtect Desktop Edition and ShadowProtect Server Edition to take snapshots of systems every hour.” Furman says his business uses ShadowProtect, not only to backup systems they are managing, but to migrate systems from one type of hardware to brand new hardware.
Because workstations can be tough to rebuild, Furman says that ShadowProtect is an invaluable tool for his business. “ShadowProtect’s Hardware Independent Restore feature is a huge time saver,” he adds. “Multiple vendors help us create one image that we can deploy over and over again.”
Finding ways to save time and money are part of the process of polishing his business.
Furman says his goal isn’t to grow his company into a behemoth. He would rather run a small company and constantly refine STF consulting to make it better. “I have a vision for my company where it is always improving. I am always fine tuning our offering. I ask myself, ‘How can we make it better than ever?’ Building our MSP offering means constant refinement and figuring out how we can get more with less.”
When Furman and his team get a new lead, they spend weeks preparing – sizing up the customer’s needs, their systems and processes, and assessing whether or not the customer is a good fit for STF Consulting. “I tell potential customers that I’m evaluating them while they’re investigating me. I want customers who will accept my methodology, my procedures. If you bring in a customer who is burdensome, it’s going to cost you.”
He also advises other IT consultants to take their time developing what they can offer their customers. “MSPs should take it slowly. Everyone’s in this mad rush to develop a solution and put it out there. Talk to your existing customers. Use them to help you design a solution.”
Customers may not like the analogy, but Furman says fishing and business are very similar: “What I like about business is what I like about fishing. The teamwork. The details.” Just like he works for weeks to prepare for a new customer, Furman works for weeks getting his boat ready, turning it into the perfect machine. Then he puts together the perfect crew to head out on the water to reel in the trophy fish. Adds Furman, “The sense of accomplishment is the same.”