HEROware: Let's talk CDP - by Lynn Shourds

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is very nice functionality to have in your Business Continuity (BC) strategy. But what is it and how does it work? Let's examine:

CDP, by one definition refers to, "...the backup of computer data by automatically saving a copy of every change made to that data, essentially capturing every version of the data that the user saves. It allows the user or administrator to restore data to any point in time."

These points in time are a recorded change to every change at the transactional layer. Changes are journaled in a SQL database and a user or administrator can retrieve data or restore any particular point in time.

The reason this is important in a BC strategy is because the ability to quickly and efficiently retrieve lost or damaged files is critical to your business cost-per-hour. If you lose data and you have to go back to tape, the time involved in this struggle can be very costly. On average, a small business' hourly cost is $1000.00 per hour. Therefore, if it takes you 4 hours to retrieve data from tape, effectively it costs $4000.00 to get that data back...not to mention the costs that could be involved if you have to have an engineer come on site to do the work. If the file is not recoverable at all then your costs could move from just financial to business critical.

Along with real-time local backup and off-site disaster recovery, CDP is a nice option in the mix for quick file retrieval and recovery. CDP takes a little extra storage so be sure to plan accordingly. The extra few dollars for more drive space easily outweighs the financial and emotional hit of losing files or trying to restore them from tape.

Thanks for listening,

Lynn
>check us out at http://www.heroware.com/

HEROware: The word from SMB VOIP in D.C. - by Lynn Shourds

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. I'm spending this week at the SMB VOIP show in Washington D.C. I've brought along our newest sales manager, Terence Green Jr.

This has been quite the experience for young Terence. At only 24 years old, and a recent graduate from USC (University of Southern California), this is his first foray into technology and this crazy world of IT shows. He has walked the floors and looked at all the booths, only to come back to me and ask me what it all means.

What does it all mean? I think it means business is alive and well in the U.S.  These are all companies that are growing and plodding along, regardless of how economists think we're doing. We're all in the same boat; running technology companies on restricted budgets. However, as many claim, starting a company during a recession has one grand benefit - you know the value of a dime.

So back to Terence. As each prospective client walks past our booth he attempts to stop them and engage in conversation. And after each conversation he turns to me and asks what that person meant by "X". I then watch him file it away for his next conversation and by the end of the first day he's talking and describing and selling our company and products. I feel like a proud father watching his son take his first baby steps.

Across the hallway from us is Harry Brelsford and the SMB Nation gang. Next to us on the right is The ASCII Group and to our left is D&H Distribution. We're surrounded by stellar companies, who in their respective business lines are clear leaders. This particular show is attended by telecom companies and agents, so this is a new arena for us.

Once again, back to Terence. The first day has ended and he turns to me and says, "I think I did really good today. I talked about our products, I handed out information about what we do, and I collected leads to call into when we get back home."

I could only reply, "Yes you did, Terence, you did a great job. Now go get me a cocktail!" :)

Thanks for listening,

Lynn
>check us out at http://www.heroware.com/

HEROware: Do you have time to worry about your backups? - by Lynn Shourds

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. Running your small business daily is enough of a task that you shouldn't also have to worry about running your server backups too.

In many old-school scenarios, business owners have to rely on switching out tapes and controlling the tape rotation and making sure the backups run correctly and bla, bla, bla. This is a very arduous task and one that most business owners neither want to do, or seem to have the time to do correctly.

In the many conversations I have daily with resellers and end-users the age-old dilemma of how to best perform backups and recovery are hot topics. Business owners know that they need it, and resellers know that they need to supply it as best practices to keep a company in business should local outages arise or the big disaster happens.

Since I have been in the BC (business continuity) space for over 10 years, I have seen many differing types of backup scenarios. Because of that, I started HEROware to bring the best technology available down to the SMB space, so everyday small business owners could have the peace of mind knowing their backups are continually running, there are no tapes to have to worry about, they have a real-time copy of their entire server and their data, and they have the ability to fail-over in minutes if they have a production server outage. This is the same technology enterprise sized companies have been using for years, but up to now it has not been affordable for small businesses.

I can't think of a reason to still worry about tapes if this technology is available and affordable. I say at least give it a try. You've got nothing to lose - in fact, we have a 30-day Try and Buy policy on all our products.

Looking back, this post seems like more of a marketing piece. Oh well, I'm allowed to be long-winded and self-serving every now and then!

Thanks for listening,

Lynn
>check us out at http://www.heroware.com/

HEROware: Small Businesses are particularly vulnerable during disasters - by Lynn Shourds

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. According to a recent article published by the Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), "As meteorologists predicted, this year's Atlantic Hurricane Season is producing a high number of hurricanes and tropical storms."

This increased activity is a reminder of the importance of having a business continuity plan, according to the IBHS. Diana McClure, IBHS's business resiliency manager says that, "...of the small businesses that are forced to close due to a disaster, at least one in four never reopens. The reality is probably higher than that, because most statistics just cover the first two years, and some businesses hang on for two to five years before they give up."

Running a business isn't easy. The threat of going out of business due to disaster is real. Most companies don't look at DR (disaster recovery) until something happens. It's sad to say, but the realities of having a BC (business continuity) plan are viewed in terms of "well nothing bad has happened yet." This is the exact mentality that leads to a company going out of business.

There are so many types of disasters. As I often say, most of those are local outages and are within a company's own data center or server closet. However, a disaster event can be a "natural disaster, an intentional or unintentional human-caused incident, a technological failure, pandemic flu or high absenteeism. A loss is a loss whatever the cause", says McClure.

The number 1 and 2 things the IBHS says to Not Do are:

1. Do not plan in a vacuum: Build a team within the organization representing different departments/functions and take into account external factors (dependence on infrastructure, suppliers, customer base).



2. Do not keep critical information and data in only one place: Regularly back up critical information and data and store it off-site or online.



I know today's blog post was mostly about this article, but this is very important stuff. I can wait to write my own thoughts; this article and these points need to be disseminated.

Thanks for listening,

Lynn
>check us out at http://www.heroware.com/

HEROware: Talking the Talk, and Walking the Walk - by Lynn Shourds

http://www.heroware.com/

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. As software and hardware goes, it's one thing to manufacture product and sell it, and another to actually use it in-house as part of your daily routine.
I'm referring to our HERO VBCA.  This is one of the products we sell everyday and tell end-users and resellers that they need it. That's the "Talking the Talk" part.

Now for the "Walking the Walk" part. We use our product everyday in-house to protect our HEROware SBS 2008 server running Exchange and other various services. We replicate our entire server, in real-time, to our VBCA so we consistently have an up-to-the-second copy of our production server.

This past weekend we actually had to put our money where our mouth is. We had a hardware issue with our production server which slowly caused corruption in our Exchange database. On Monday morning we started working on the issue to see if we could quickly fix it. Once we determined that we were not going to be able to solve the issue in a timely manner, we failed-over our production server to our VBCA. Within our VBCA we had enabled snapshots so we could choose a point-in-time for restoration. We determined that the safe fail-over point was last Friday at 5:00PM - so we restored to that point.

In minutes our production server was spun-up into a Hyper-V session and our production server was back online and Exchange was running perfectly. This is the beauty of using the Double-Take Software product as our underlying technology...it just works!

So, we're now in fix-it mode for our original production server, but we're not in a panic since we're back up and running smoothly in our VBCA. I'm happy that our sales team "Talks the Talk" everyday, and now they have a home-grown story to back-up the "Walk the Walk" side as well.

Thanks for listening,

Lynn
>check us out at http://www.heroware.com/

HEROware: Time to talk about MS Licensing - by Lynn Shourds

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. I'm seeing a lot of activity lately on blog posts, internet IT chat rooms, and online help sites about how to handle the different versions of Microsoft licensing when failing over or moving a production server to another server.

Now, normally I try to keep these posts fairly generic, but today I'm going to inject a lot about HEROware specifically.

When you use a HEROware BCA or VBCA, we replicate the entire server image to our appliance. In doing so we are taking over the OS, Apps, System State, Data and everything that resides on that original production server (if you choose to take everything). We are replicating all this information in real-time so you have an up-to-the-second copy of your entire production server sitting on our appliance, just waiting so you can recover data or fail-over and recover an entire image on our appliance.

With Microsoft licensing such as Full packaged product, Volume Licensing, Open Licensing, etc., when a production server is failed-over to our BCA or VBCA, the licenses for both the OS and the Microsoft apps all fail-over without a hitch. These licenses are not bound to the hardware.

However, if the original production server licensing is purchased as Microsoft OEM licensing, then this type of license is bound to the original production hardware. Therefore, when we fail-over or restore to one of our appliances, we are bound by the licensing agreement Microsoft has with the original OEM manufacturer. So, in this case (as in all cases of moving this type of license no matter what product you are using) after failover you MUST call Microsoft and advise them of the fail-over scenario so they can "bless" and correctly license this move.

Although this is a pain in the tush, until Microsoft makes any changes to this configuration we all have to go through this extra step. But, if you look at it with open eyes you'll realize that even though you had to take that extra step, having the ability to fail-over and continue production surpasses the minor inconvenience of having to make that call.

Thanks for listening,

Lynn
>check us out at http://www.heroware.com/

HEROware: Survey: BC/DR a top IT priority in 2011

HEROware: Survey: BC/DR a top IT priority in 2011: "Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. In a recent survey from Forrester Research posted on CSO Online, '...business c..."

Survey: BC/DR a top IT priority in 2011

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. In a recent survey from Forrester Research posted on CSO Online, "...business continuity and disaster recovery plans will be a major concern and increased area of spending in the next 12 months".

According to Joan Goodchild, Senior Editor at CSO, the scope of BC/DR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) programs is growing to include all sources of downtime, including "mundane power outages and weather-related disruptions", not just rare, catastrophic disasters.

Looking at these findings helps to secure my position on the 24x7 Business Continuity model. Seeing that the majority of failures happen locally it is very important to have a local real-time backup with the ability to fail-over within minutes to provide that local BC. It's important to protect your company against catastrophic disasters as well, so replicating to the Cloud is a great way to round out your BC/DR plan.

As Joan explains, it's traditionally been difficult to quantify the spending on a BC/DR plan. However, the increased level of risk associated with lost data and system downtime have most companies viewing their BC/DR budgets differently. As systems become more demanding, especially email and database apps, the higher the demand is for faster recovery times and less loss of data.

This report from Forrester Research states that "considering the level of priority and increased investment, BC/DR can confidently consider itself among the critical elements of a comprehensive IT program".

For all of us here at HEROware, that's really good news!

Thanks for listening,

Lynn
>check us out at http://www.heroware.com/

Is Customer Service Still King?

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. So, this morning I was at Starbucks getting my morning oatmeal and sure enough, while trying to drain the water from the cup, I dumped the entire thing into the trash bin. As ridiculously stupid as I felt, the overwhelming customer service at Starbucks kicked straight into gear and an employee immediately offered me another oatmeal - free of charge.

This got me thinking; is retail the only place where customer service is still King? I say no. Just because a company is not face-to-face with the public doesn't mean customer service can slip. Look at what happened to Sprint when its customer service record went into the tank. They lost business and were consistently ranked as one of the poorest companies to do business with. Since then Sprint CEO, Dan Hesse, has personally taken this task on and put himself in commercials outlining Sprint's new commitment to customer service.

When I think of IT related companies that offer great customer service, one in particular comes to mind; SMB Nation. Harry Brelsford and his team are consistently committed to excellence and are particularly attentive to their customer's needs. Every phone call I have with the SMB Nation team makes me feel as though I'm the most important member of their Tribe...and that always feels good.

In the IT world customer service has to be King. Resellers and end-users need to feel as though they are well taken care of, from the sale, to support, to ongoing maintenance. That's one of the benefits of running HEROware as a small company. We are very nimble and can offer our resellers and end-users uncompromised customer service and support.

Thanks for listening,

Lynn
>check us out at http://www.heroware.com/

Data Backups just don't cut it anymore...

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. According to a recent article from Gadget.com, "...Although most companies recognize the necessity of disaster recovery plans and data restoration procedures, some are still relying on old backup and recovery methods that can affect the prognosis for a full recovery".

This article makes a very good point; protecting your business against data loss and downtime is very dependent on the type of medium you use along with the frequency. If you are still using tape backup and running backups once a night, you are in the dark ages and apparently you don't care much about the actual ability to recover.

Backups, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery rely on a systematic approach whereby you are backing up all your data and your systems so that you not only recover data, but you recover your systems as well. The ability to protect your entire environment against local failures and also full disasters is paramount.

So, think about your strategy. How much data can you afford to lose if your server fails? How much time can you afford to be down if your server fails? Remember, your total outage is really the time span between how far back you have to go to recover your data and how long it takes for you to fix your system and be back up and running.

Thanks for listening...

Lynn
>check us out at http://www.heroware.com/

Cloud, Cloud, Cloud...

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. These days we're hearing more and more about the Cloud. I read an interesting article this morning from Scott Raymond on ZDNet.com.

Scott wrote about the affordability of online backups for small and medium businesses.

In my humble opinion, online backups are great, but only if you have your initial line of defense shored up first. The 24x7 business continuity model requires local high-availability along with off-site (online) backups for disaster recovery. To add to this model, long-term archives of business data rounds out the entire solution.

Since the high majority of outages occur locally it seems to make the most sense to protect your business with a local backup that is real-time, fast, reliable, and easily recoverable. Getting your data off-site to the Cloud is secondary, but none the less something that should be done to complete your 24x7 business continuity.

Remember, business only resumes after an outage if you have the right systems in place; both locally and in the Cloud. These systems may seem like just an insurance policy, but it sure feels good when you need them.

Lynn

HEROware will be at SMB Nation VOIP Show