Backup & Beyond

True to its name, August has been a great month for us.

August 1: We were a finalist in Windows IT Pro magazine’s awards in the ‘Interoperability’ category, thanks to our ability to maintain a homogeneous look/feel across heterogeneous environments & operating systems - Windows, Linux (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, SuSe), FreeBSD & Mac OS X.

I just realized how much has happened this month - on August 1, the other finalist in the Interoperability category, Xensource, had not yet been acquired by Citrix!

August 7: Red Herring announced their list of the 200 finalists for the ‘Red Herring 100 Asia’ - Asia’s 100 most innovative technology companies. We’d made it to the list of 200 finalists!

Today, August 30: Red Herring just put up the list of 100 winners, and…

WE WON!

From all of us here at Vembu Tech, Thank you dear partners & customers. We’ll save you the pain of reading through one of those ‘Oscar Acceptance’ like speeches, but honestly, with all your feedback, feature requests, brickbats & bouquets, you’ve really helped us stay innovative!

Coming to think of it, its been an August year…earlier this year, we also made it to CRN’s list of emerging vendors for our channel friendly practices!

I’m sure there’s something called the Weekend Law, and that it works hand in glove with Murphy’s, especially in the context of a software release. We were hoping to release v2.2 of the Service Provider Edition by March 10, 2007 and celebrate over the weekend!

It seems the bubbly will have to wait!

If memory serves me right, there were two previous instances where we aimed for a pre-weekend release and ended up working through the weekends, through to the next week.

The good news is: we did (in those two instances) have the releases the next week.

We’re currently shooting for (optimistic) March 12 / (pragmatic) March 14.

Thanks for your patience, and for all the feedback you’ve provided on the release candidate (approx. 1,200 mails were sent out last week announcing the release candidate and soliciting feedback); 2.2 is looking good

We’ve been speaking about v2.2 of the Service Provider Edition for some time. Many partners & customers have asked for more detail on the new features in this loaded version. While we’ve been providing bullet points & details on these new features, a picture is worth a 1000 words, and a video is worth a lot more (11,610,000 words to be exact, for this particular video- ask me why :-))

The video below is a You Tube version. If you’d like a more hi-res (16MB) version, please download the Windows Movie (.wmv) file from here (please right click the link and choose “Save Link As…” or “Save Target As…”)

We’d love your feedback, and hope you’re as excited about 2.2 as we are. As someone rightly mentioned in our forum, considering the number and kinds of improvements, we should have called it v3.0 !

Oh, it’s there on the video but let me tell you here anyway - we’re currently 2 weeks into the testing process, are looking at a release date of March 10, and expect to have the release candidate available by March 3. Fingers crossed; thanks for your patience!

Vembu StoreGrid Service Provider Edition v2.2 - A Preview

Great! We’ve finally got this blog on the road.

We’ll be using this quite often to keep you up to date with developments on Vembu StoreGrid. There will be the occasional ‘off topic’ post, I’d expect! But by and large, we’ll stick to StoreGrid, backup & IT - in that order of priority!

We’ll update our forum when something ‘important’ is posted on this blog. And if its really big news (like a new release), you’ll probably get an email as well - if you’re in our ‘nearing unmanageable’ database.

There’s an RSS feed here - if you do use a reader (personally, I use Google Reader, even though it’s still in official Beta), please add us to your reading list.

Our first ‘real’ post will be a video providing an overview of what’s coming in the Service Provider Edition v2.2 ; for more on that, please watch this space.