ShadowProtect Blog

SSG-NOW Analyst's view of the Business Continuity Suite

StorageCraft and Symform zoom into online disaster recovery and business continuity

Partnership between software vendors for MSP storage services

By Deni Connor
Senior Analyst
Storage Strategies NOW
September 2010

Data protection and recovery software developer StorageCraft and cloud services provider Symform moved into the world of cloud-based disaster recovery and business continuity with a recent partnership in which Symform will be a platform for protecting StorageCraft ShadowProtect images.

The Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform allows Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to offer their customers backup and disaster recovery as a cloud-based storage offering. Using ShadowProtect™ technology, MSPs save backup images onsite and offsite, via the Symform Cooperative Storage Cloud™ to enable near-line and cloud-based disaster recovery.

Simply, the Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform allows ShadowProtect image-level backups to be securely distributed across other small and mid-sized businesses and among its IT service providers in a cooperative and shared storage fashion in order to protect it and ensure its recoverability.

StorageCraft and Symform are among the first vendors to craft such a deal, which provides their MSP partners and their SMB customers with an affordable and easily implemented means of disaster recovery.

Market background
In the SMB market, although 50% of businesses have a local backup strategy, they often do not have an affordable and efficient means of moving data offsite for protection in the event of a disaster. They may shuttle tapes offsite or they may use an online backup service such as EMC MozyPro or Carbonite, whose pricing is based on a capacity of storage stored. An SMB will soon find that these methods for protecting data and providing business continuity are too error-prone, cumbersome to administer and time-consuming means to recover data quickly. And, they are expensive – online backup services can cost almost $400 a month to protect even just one file server.

Enter the Business Continuity Suite
StorageCraft has partnered with Symform to use its distributed storage system across small and mid-sized businesses and their IT storage service providers. Here’s how the Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform works.

StorageCraft ShadowProtect Server™, ShadowProtect Small Business Server™ or ShadowProtect Desktop™ creates an encrypted, image-based backup of a designated system.  This series of differential and incremental point-in-time backup image files are then stored in locally hosted folders. The Symform Node software, which is installed on one computer in the customer’s network, is pointed at these local folders, where it monitors them for file adds or changes. It then automatically mirrors the adds and changes made to local storage to the cloud, where it creates a duplicate file structure.

Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform

Each StorageCraft image file is reduced to a series of 64MB blocks, which are then encrypted using AES-256 encryption algorithms. These 64MB blocks are then shredded locally into 1MB fragments. Using an erasure encoding algorithm called Reed-Solomon, 32 parity fragments are added to every 64, resulting in 96 fragments. Dubbed RAID-96™ by Symform, any 64 of the 96 segments can recreate the original block, thereby guaranteeing recoverability and high-availability.

All 96 fragments are distributed using a random statistical model to 96 participating Nodes in the Symform Cooperative Storage Cloud. An application called Symform Cloud Control™, which runs at Amazon Cloud Services (EC2) acts as a traffic controller, tells the local machine where to place each of the fragments.\

When the Symform Node is configured, the end-user or MSP determines how much local disk space it plans to contribute to the cloud. This can be disk space at a local office or that of a MSP. An SMB or its MSP simply needs to contribute as much disk space as the disk space they want to consume with StorageCraft image-level backups.

Channel impact

The Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform is a completely channel-focused program, with pricing determined by StorageCraft and Symform MSPs. It makes disaster recovery practical for SMBs and at much less cost – approximately $50 per month per protected server.

The solution lets MSPs provide disaster recovery and business continuity services without a huge outlay for business continuity infrastructure. By simply donating disk space to the Symform Cooperative Storage Cloud, the MSP can reap the advantages of acting as a storage services provider (SSP).

SSG-NOW Assessment
StorageCraft’s and Symform’s approach to cloud-based business continuity is a shoo-in for the small and mid-sized business, which is faced with expensive and often unreliable solutions for cloud enablement. The MSP focus of this announcement is close to perfect for the SMB who does business with a particular MSP because of the customer’s inability or disinclination to provide IT resources and because of its relative inexperience with technology. The Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform is priced right for the MSP market – at $50 per protected server, it provides an affordable, easy for the MSP to implement alternative to other inefficient cloud-based backup and recovery solutions on the market.

NOTE: You can read the full report here.

Online Training for Cloud Backup

We announced our new joint cloud backup venture today, the Business Continuity Suite powered by StorageCraft and Symform. The news announcement highlights our partnership and how MSPs can use the Business Continuity Suite to backup their customers' systems and data near-line and off-site.

In the next few weeks, Symform and StorageCraft will offer Web-based training courses so you can learn how the Business Continuity Suite works and how to set it up to get the most benefit for your customers.

Basically, the Business Continuity Suite will help you provide the following:

•     Get systems up and running quickly after a catastrophic failure.

•    Backup on-site and replicate to the cloud for flexible disaster recovery options.

•    Restore to bare metal, to dissimilar hardware or to and from virtual environments.

•    Multiple levels of encryption and military grade security of backup files to prevent intrusion.

•    Schedule full and incremental backups to be saved automatically on-site and in the cloud.

•    Contribute excess storage and get valuable cloud storage in return.

•    Rapid recovery of files, folders or your entire system should a disaster occur.

You can learn more about the Business Continuity Suite at www.businesscontinuitysuite.com, where you'll find white papers, data sheets, an analyst's report and more. Or sign up for the free, one-hour classes which will show you how you can offer simple, affordable cloud backup to your customers.

Setting Up Your Server Backup

We get a lot of requests for best practices and recommendations for ways to set up your server environment. ShadowProtect makes it pretty easy to backup everything on your Windows servers, but there are ways to set things up so that you're maximizing your resources and your business continuity.

So one of our technical engineers has put together a great guide that outlines some ways to configure your servers and keep them up and running. It involves backing up each Windows server with  ShadowProtect Server (or ShadowProtect Small Business Server) and running ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise on your critical servers so they're backed up onsite and offsite. This way, when there's a business disruption -- from a server crash to a category 5 hurricane -- you can restore your servers, recover your data, and get your business running again.

These scenarios involve our new VirtualBoot technology, that allows you to boot a ShadowProtect backup image file into a virtual machine in a matter of a few short minutes, as well as HeadStart Restore, which allows you to restore your backups before they're needed. You can find out more about ShadowProtect by visiting the product pages, or you're always welcome to contact us with your questions.

Ways to Use ShadowProtect Server

ShadowProtect Server and ShadowProtect Small Business Server have a lot of uses beyond backup and disaster recovery. You may not even know all of the ways that ShadowProtect Server can help you protect your valuable business data. That's why we've put together a scenario guide that shows several different ways you can use ShadowProtect Server for various problems.

For example, if you thought ShadowProtect Server was just a tool to help you perform server backup or bare metal recovery, you will be pleasantly surprised. Some of the other use cases include server migration, granular recovery of files and folders, disaster recovery testing and planning, backup verification and backup management.

The scenario guide is posted on our Web site as a PDF. Download it to find out all of the ways that the latest version in the award-winning ShadowProtect line of backup, disaster recovery and migration software can help you protect your data.

Server Backup Review

Redmond Magazine has a new review roundup of several different kinds of backup and disaster recovery products. The review focuses on four solutions for small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) including StorageCraft ShadowProtect Server™. Each software product is designed especially to backup and restore servers,

The reviewer gave ShadowProtect high marks, and pointed out several great features in SP.

Backups in SP are image-based, using the underlying VSS technology in Windows Server and providing very fast backups after the first full backup, as only changed sectors are backed up.

SP is a comprehensive product, offering efficient backups and smoothly blending the physical and virtual worlds for easy disaster recovery.

If you own a small business or are a reseller catering to SMBs, you'll definitely want to look over this review roundup and check out for yourself how ShadowProtect Server can help you keep your customers up and running following a disaster or catastrophic failure.

Fast Recovery With ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise

In the last article, we focused on the features in ShadowProtect ImageManager and how they can help you manage your backup image files. Earlier this year, StorageCraft released an enhanced version of the product called ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™. It has all of the features in the standard version: consolidation of backup image files, file verification as well as notification settings.

But ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise also includes two additional features that make it much easier to improve business continuity and lower your recovery time objective (RTO), the maximum amount of time your server systems can be out of commission. These features are HeadStart Restore™ and replication.

HeadStart Restore - or HSR - allows you to begin the server recovery process right away, before a disaster. Whether it’s a natural disaster that took you out or a RAID router meltdown, it doesn’t really matter. You have to get access to your data as quickly as possible and you have to get your business running again.

First, you need to set up ShadowProtect Server (or ShadowProtect Small Business Server) to take regular backups of your data, then ShadowProtect will take snapshots of a point in time on your server. You can even set the scheduler in ShadowProtect to take incremental backups – just the deltas or small changes to your server – throughout the day.

The next thing you do is set ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise to create a restore job for a specific server. Once you’ve set up that job, ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise updates that restore job with the incremental changes that are made, so your restore job has all of the data updates that were made throughout the day. Here’s the really cool part: when a catastrophe strikes, you won’t have to wait hours and hours (or days and days) to get that server online again, because HSR has already been restoring the server. Recovery starts and is ongoing as your backups continue.

To get the server online, it will take just a few more steps. First, you finalize your restore job, which takes just a few seconds. Now you need to get it ready to restore into a virtual machine so you run ShadowProtect’s Hardware Independent Restore™ technology. Now you just reboot your server, and you’re up and running again. This process takes 15-20 minutes, even if you have a multi-TB volume of data.

The other key feature in ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is replication. Now you can send your backup images to an off-site location so that your backups are secure in case your primary location is wiped out by flood, fire or another sort of catastrophe.

You'll want to note that  ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise is licensed per server. So one license allows you to perform one HeadStart Restore job, one on-site replication and one off-site replication.

You can find out more by visiting the ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise product page.

Managing Backups with ShadowProtect ImageManager

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.