Posts Tagged ‘cloud backup’

What’s New in Vembu Home Beta

by Jay on April 13th, 2010

We have released a latest update of the Vembu Home Agent to our online backup service customers. This update carries some of the most requested features from our users since the initial release. As an added incentive we are upgrading the free users for a storage quota of 2 GB. The Vembu Home Beta Update can be downloaded here.

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Network Mapped Drive'Do not Backup' Window, Encryption Password & CPU ConfigAdvanced Graphic Backup ReportOne-Click Backup

Here are the highlights of the new features which are available with the latest update.

I. Network Mapped Drives support:

One of the most requested features since our initial release was the support for mapped drives. With this feature, the users will be able to

  1. Backup from a network mapped drive to the Local HDDs or the Cloud Server
  2. Store local backups to a network mapped drive

This feature is ideally used by users who have multiple computers/devices with critical data to backup but which have an operating system not yet supported by Vembu Home. Using a simple network mapping to the share or drive of the other systems, users will be able to backup those computers. The users can also backup to and from your Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices.

II. Global Configuration of backup encryption password & CPU Usage:

In our initial release, users had to configure encryption password and CPU usage for each backup set. We have now moved the password and CPU usage configurations under the options tab along with Backup Window configuration. Users will now be able to store a common global encryption password for all their backups. The users can also change the CPU usage dynamically for all the backups at one place.

III. ‘Do not Backup’ Window Settings configured by default:

Now, ‘Do not backup’ window settings are configured by default between 8 AM to 6 PM. Users don’t have to now worry about backups hogging the system resources during those hours. Backups will automatically stop during the ‘Do not backup’ window hours, and will resume after the window. This default configuration has been done only on fresh Vembu Home installations. For the existing installations, you can go to the Options Tab and manually configure them.

IV. Test Connectivity with the Amazon Cloud Server:

With this feature you can check the connectivity with the Amazon Cloud Server.

V. Advanced Graphical Backup Report added:

We have added a more intuitive backup report for

  1. Files configured for backup, protected files & skipped files
  2. Storage quota in Amazon Cloud, storage used by backup & storage used by the client.

VI. One-Click Configuration of Pre-Configured Backups:

A more intuitive representation for the pre-configured backups available with Vembu Home Console is now provided. This provides one-click configuration of your favorite backups such as My Documents, Outlook, Registry & System State, Browser Settings etc.

VII. Support for Automatic Software Updates:

Now, any future software updates will be automatically downloaded and installed without any manual efforts from the user.

One of the major under-the-hood features included in this update is the addition of an embedded local web service to the Vembu Home Agent instead of the more bulky Apache-PHP Web Service, making the client much more light weight.

The update also includes several other under-the-hood enhancements which improve the overall performance of the Vembu Home Agent.

The above post was written by Jay of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

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Posted in New Release, Online Backup, Vembu Home



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Storage on a Budget for MSPs!

by gokul on March 3rd, 2010

Offsite backup storage solutions at commodity hardware prices

Folks in the UK are building storage boxes that could house up to petabytes of data using commodity hardware.  Managed Service Providers can benefit from this cost-effective storage solution for their StoreGrid Backup or Replication servers.

This initially started as an effort by an online backup service provider to build cheap cloud storage for its own storage needs (thanks to them for sharing the design for those who wish to build their storage cost-effectively!).   This has triggered a few hardware architects in the UK to explore building cheap storage options for service providers.  Interested?  They are taking orders for the storage cases.

Would be interesting to see how Managed Service Providers use these cost-effective storage solutions to cut down the cost of their off-site storage and replace it with their own.  StoreGrid has partnered with leading storage technologies like the Amazon Cloud, Parascale and Caringo for the backup storage component of their online backup service.

Using StoreGrid, MSPs have a variety of options in setting up the backend for their service depending upon their customer needs.

1) Own servers in their data center / colo along with RAID drives / NAS storage devices / innovative storage pods as the one above for storage.

2) Amazon Cloud for running the backup service with StoreGrid running on EC2 instances (there’s a ready AMI with StoreGrid’s latest version pre-installed!) and Amazon’s S3 service for the storage.  This option features unbeatable pricing for offsite storage.

3) Parascale or Caringo cluster software for setting up the storage backend for StoreGrid backup/replication servers

4) Hybrid options using a combination of the above.  (E.g. on-premise backup server with data replication to the Amazon S3 service)

5) Locally attached drives in client machines for backups where you would like to have a copy available locally while having another copy in the backup server.

With so many cost-effective options, what are you waiting for?

The above post was written by Gokul Sriram of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

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Posted in Online Backup, SP Edition



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The Cloud: Substance wins over Form

by gokul on February 3rd, 2010

The Cloud has garnered quite a bit of media storm since its advent with big names like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Sun throwing in their hats in the ring.   Not to mention the controversy kicked up by McKinsey’s uncharitable comments on the Cloud.

We have always believed that the Cloud would be a valuable addition to an MSP’s arsenal – and we went about supporting Amazon Cloud services precisely because of that.  This enabled our partners to either operate their entire backup service out of Amazon’s EC2/S3 services or simply leverage S3 storage service for the offsite replication.  And we are sure glad we were able to see the business value this brought to MSPs early on and be among the first to adopt this crucial step in the backup/storage industry.

The concepts of substance and form always been closely examined since historical times.    Steve DuPlessie (of ESG fame) gave a unique twist to this age-old ‘form vs. substance’ conundrum with this incisive post on the Cloud here -

Surely, the Cloud is a very convenient ‘construct’ – so much so that it took a lot of time for the industry and analysts to even pin down a definition for the Cloud!   Steve makes two significant points in this post – one, that ‘being’ a Cloud is a sure way to failing in the long run (after a great round A valuation, of course :-) ) and two, that ‘using’ the Cloud for viable solutions will be better off than those masquerading AS the Cloud.

The Cloud ‘form’ became very important for all those who sought to ride the media wave when the Cloud started getting a whole lot of media attention last year.  I noticed several BU/DR firms started sporting the term ‘Cloud Backups’.  This was funny since none of them had even the basic characteristics of cloud computing (like scalablilty (on the scale of the Amazon Cloud),  true pay-for-what-you-use model, etc.) – features which can only come through actual seamless integration of a backup solution with a Cloud service provider.

I believe that the ’substance’ of the Cloud is what counts for a service provider – the solution to her client’s problem that makes business sense for her to provide.  Not all the ‘form’ – backup players sporting websites with ‘Cloud’ strewn all over – the proverbial new bottle for their old wine.

Vembu StoreGrid has provided a perfect platform for MSPs to USE the Cloud where it makes perfect business sense.  Case in point, offsite replication from StoreGrid to Amazon’s dependable S3 storage service costs less than 50cents/GB/month*.  Before this, MSPs were used to spending ridiculous amounts to get offsite storage services of questionable security with no scalability or pay-for-use model.

We still see a lot of backup players going gung-ho about Cloud related terms for their backup solutions – Public Clouds (as opposed to what?), Hybrid Clouds (an umbrella term meant to cover all they wished were a Cloud, but wasn’t)…. and so on.

I see that when the dust settles on the Cloud phenomenon, MSPs will be quick to see what is getting passed of as ‘Cloud Backups’ to them.  I think the day when the skies will clear is not far off and all undeserved ‘Cloud Backup’ terms in several websites will be off in a jiffy!

* – As of  1st Feb 2010.  Please check the latest AWS pricing here.

The above post was written by Gokul Sriram of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

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Posted in Amazon Cloud, Online Backup, SP Edition, Vembu StoreGrid



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Backup data to the cloud, within the cloud and from the cloud

by Sekar Vembu on November 8th, 2008

The initial interest in our StoreGrid Cloud AMI solution for Amazon Web Services has been extremely encouraging. As we have more and more partners & customers testing it and discussing their ‘use cases’, we have been getting fantastic insights into the myriad possibilities the cloud throws up for all types of users. This includes MSPs and VARs offering online backup services and businesses running custom applications in the Amazon Cloud.

Backup to the cloud

The typical use case and the premise on which we started our Cloud AMI, this deployment  has service providers running the StoreGrid Cloud AMI as a backup server in Amazon EC2 by provisioning their own Amazon EBS storage. Thereafter, they install the StoreGrid Client in their customer PCs & Servers and configure it to backup to the StoreGrid Cloud AMI. This deployment is very compelling for service providers who do not want to host their customers’ backup data in their own data center. Compelling as it is, it is worth mentioning a few disadvantages with this approach…

One of the advantages a local service provider enjoys is her proximity to the customer. This is especially important when a customer has large amount of data, say 100 GB or more, to be backed up. The initial seed backup for that kind of data over the internet is going to take a long time. To circumvent this problem, StoreGrid supports a feature called “Local to Remote Server Migration (L2R)” which allows the service provider to go on-premise and do a local backup of the first full backup to an external drive. The service provider then manually copies the data from the external drive to the StoreGrid backup server deployed in her data center and then runs the “L2R” module in StoreGrid. This will ensure that the subsequent backups are done incrementally, i.e. only changed blocks are sent over the wire on subsequent backups. With an Amazon deployment, using this L2R feature would not be possible simply because one does not have physical access to the Amazon cloud. Hence, the first full backup has to be done over the internet, regardless of however long that will take. The same is the case when you have to do large restores. A StoreGrid online backup Service Provider with her own data center can do a quick server side restore to an external disk and deliver it to her customer. With the Amazon deployment, the restores have to be done only over the internet even if it is 100s of GB of data.

By no means am I trying to discourage service providers from using the Amazon cloud as the data center for their online backup service business. But it is best to take decisions after analyzing all pros and cons along with what exactly the customers’ needs are. It is also best to set the expectations of the end customer upfront so that the customer is fully aware of, and educated on what she is signing up to. That way you won’t have a “but I thought you’d ship me my data in 1 hour” kind of situation.

A hybrid approach – backup locally and to the cloud

In light of the above discussion, service providers who want to leverage the Amazon Cloud but have the benefit of quick on-site restores could explore a hybrid option wherein the StoreGrid backup server is deployed locally in a customer site and the StoreGrid Cloud AMI is run as a replication server in Amazon EC2. In this deployment model, the on-premise backup servers would be replicating the backup data to the replication server in the Amazon Cloud. A single replication server can receive data from multiple backup servers running across multiple customer sites. We have many service provider partners using the hybrid approach already with the StoreGrid replication server deployed in their own data center.

Backup within the cloud – backing up data from custom applications running in Amazon EC2

Very interestingly, there are also a few service providers and some end users who are deploying the StoreGrid Client in Amazon EC2 along with their custom applications (which are already running in EC2). We did not think about this use case initially but in retrospect its a fairly obvious opportunity…

Considering that many businesses are looking at running their custom applications in Amazon EC2, backing up application data (which is typically stored in the Amazon EBS volumes) from these custom applications are extremely important too! Even though Amazon supports backing up the EBS storage to Amazon S3 as a snapshot, this is not always sufficient. The reason being the snapshot backup of a whole EBS volume does not provide the granularity required for a partial data restore. With snapshot backup, you can only restore the whole volume data into a new EBS volume. However, with a StoreGrid client deployed in an Amazon EC2 instance running a custom application, businesses and IT solution providers, now have the option of configuring file level backups of the EBS volumes. This also applies to backing up data from any application which uses a relational database back end like MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server – since these database backups are supported by StoreGrid!

Where would these clients backup to? Typically, to a StoreGrid Cloud AMI deployed as a backup server – ideally, running in a different availability zone in the Amazon Cloud. The backing up of EBS volume at a granular file level would give enormous flexibility while trying to restore data partially. No wonder we are already generating some interest with this deployment option.

A reversal of roles – backup from the cloud to on-premise storage

Honestly, we didn’t see this coming…

An end user mentioned that they wanted to backup all their data in Amazon EBS to their on-premise storage. Read that again – from Amazon to their office!!! I was initially not convinced and wondered why someone would want to do that? Here’s why! Though he (the customer) liked running his applications in Amazon EC2 because of the benefits it offered, he was not wholly comfortable with all his customer data present only in the Amazon Cloud.

“What if the Amazon Cloud goes down or what if Amazon itself loses my application data because of some bug or an issue?”, he said. He asked me if he could deploy StoreGrid Client along with his application in Amazon EC2, have a StoreGrid backup server on-premise in his office, and simply backup the application data (stored in Amazon EBS) to the on-premise StoreGrid backup server. “Why Not?”, I thought to myself, and asked him to try it out – there’s no reason StoreGrid shouldn’t work for this kind of a deployment!

On top of this he also told me he would backup the backed up data to tape periodically and ship it for off-site storage. While I personally believe (and have told him so) him to have ‘data paranoia’, I fully understand that this is the nature of the beast! It all depends on the value you attribute to your data!

Needless to say, we are excited about all these possibilities. We are especially excited with the challenge of enhancing StoreGrid to seamlessly support such possibilities. We are gearing ourselves to explore these new frontiers!

I’d love to hear from our (current and prospective) partners and customers about their views and experiences. Got an Amazon story of your own? Do let us know.

The above post was written by Sekar Vembu of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

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Posted in General, Online Backup, Remote Backup, SMB, SP Edition, Uncategorized, Vembu StoreGrid



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