Black Friday is in the rear view mirror, and Cyber Monday is quickly passing by – did your web site survive the storm?  Both Target.com and Paypal.com experienced major outages for Cyber Monday this year.

Being prepared for large spikes in traffic is one thing, loosing sales and upsetting customers can have long term ramifications that can’t be easily fixed.  One of our own employees happened to be participating in this years land rush to Cyber Monday during his lunch break, placed an order online Target successfully only to get emailed hours later that the order had been cancelled due to availability sold out (After having accepted the order).  He was luckier than most, the site took his order online – but the end result the same as other angry Target.com shoppers yesterday – he was left out in the cold this winter shopping season.

 

Target’s response online twitter confirmed the issues, multiple site delays and crashes and mentioned this year’s traffic exceeding double the previous year’s as a cause (though online traffic reporting and analytics company’s Alexa.com and Netcraft.com could not confirm a double in volume or remotely close to that regarding Target.com).

It brings up a good lesson for any business to keep in mind.  Just what impact is there on your business if your web site or customer data, inventory, or ordering systems are inaccessible or worse, crash and loose data.  Do you have a business continuity plan and what is the financial loss (time, sales, and loss of good will for the future) mean to your business?

Just a couple of years ago around Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping season Target announced falling victim to millions of account’s being compromised including credit card information – among the worst hacking scandals of the last decade in the news.  Yet Target has survived and continues, but not all business are so lucky to survive major mis-steps like these and being un prepared or blind sided when their IT infrastructure is not adequately prepared.

Being prepared for the best (big volume spikes for the holiday shopping season) also means being prepared for the worst (outages, data loss, data corruption, and more).   Having your web site or IT infrastructure hosted in the cloud using a seasoned IT firm like TurnKey Internet can offer a safety net utilizing hardened technologies to provide the scallability and redundancy crucial for your business.

Also, consider having your corporate data, servers, and web sites mirrored into the Cloud with a service like TurnKey Vault – regardless if you are a Billion dollar retail chain, or a small business office – we all need continuous reliable access to our data to keep the lights on.

Proper planning can mean the difference of going out of business versus surviving in an unexpected crisis – not every business gets multiple strikes against them and lives to tell about it.    Don’t wait until next holiday season to evaluate your cloud-based infrastructure.

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TurnKey Internet, Inc Launches Cloud Backup with Business Continuity Service

LATHAM, NEW YORK (September 22^nd, 2015) – Sustainable IT solutions provider TurnKey Internet, Inc. announced today the launch of their TurnKey Vault Secure Cloud Backup service. The all new product delivers next-generation online backup services focused on business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) to individuals, businesses and large scale organizations across the globe.

TurnKey Vault offers next-generation backup technology including bare metal recovery, Linux, Windows and Mac operating system support, encrypted data protection, as well as backups for enterprise databases such as Oracle, MSSQL and MySQL. TurnKey Vault fills the void that exists with typical online backup solutions, by offering true business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) through next-generation Virtual Disaster Recovery combined with live cloud replication to provide instant recovery to businesses by restoring any server, PC, or laptop into a cloud-based virtual private server that is accessible via the Internet.

TurnKey Vault’s live cloud replication allows instant restoration of your operating system, files, configuration, registry files, software programs, licenses, and everything to bring your laptop, PC, or server back into full production without any additional hardware or IT staff.  Your fully restored cloud-based server, PC or laptop is cloud-ready and accessible via the Internet via any mobile phone, tablet, PC using remote desktop protocols or any web browser to access your entire system.

”Data loss is a reality – you are more likely to lose your business data in the next 7 years than get audited by the IRS.” said Adam Wills, CEO of TurnKey Internet. He continued, “The reality of the current generation backup solutions out there is that it’s not enough to just backup your data and hope to put the pieces back together after disaster strikes- that can lead to countless days or weeks of lost business productivity and expensive IT support staff time. With our TurnKey Vault technology combined with our cloud-based datacenter services, we can literally restore an entire office building of lost servers and PCs back into fully accessible and functional copies so your business can get back up and running fast.”

TurnKey Vault offers a free for life 10 GB plan with all enterprise features enabled and a reseller system for VAR’s and channel partners to offer private label branded Secure Cloud Backup services to an unlimited number of clients or devices. For more information visit https://TurnKeyVault.com.

 

About Turnkey Internet

Founded in 1999, TurnKey Internet, Inc. is a full-service green data center and leading provider of sustainable web hosting and IT solutions. From its SSAE 16 Type 2 and ENERGY STAR^® certified facility in Latham, NY—New York’s Tech Valley Region—TurnKey offers cloud-based hosted services, web hosting, communication services, web-based IT systems, software as a service (SaaS), enterprise colocation services, and computing as a service to clients in more than 150 countries. For more information, please call (518) 618-0999 or visit www.turnkeyinternet.net/media.

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You know, one thing that has become apparent about March is that a lot of  people celebrate birthdays. It seems everyday that I login to Facebook  there is another 8 people born on the same day. I don’t think I can recall  any other month has as many celebrations as  this past March, however, for  this post, we will be talking about one day in particular, March 31st.

Besides being the last day of the month, this day has a particular meaning  to it. Quick, what is the most important commodity of your business?  Anybody? No? Your data. This data could be anything from accounting records  to credit card numbers, tax records, phone numbers or even a Facebook calendar with  everyones’ birthday. Your data is among the most important commodities to your company. We all know this, but yet, why do so many of us  fail to protect our data?

You may  be saying, ‘I protect my data. I have a firewall!!!’ That’s not  the type of protection that I’m referring to and as any reader of this blog  knows, I best illustrate by providing examples. So, lets say you had been  working on a project for months. You had spent hours in development.  Tinkering until the site was the exact setup you want and then, BAM,  diaster strikes. Your hard drive dies and you lose all of your work. How  could this of been prevented? Backups, which brings us to the importance of  March 31st.

You see, March 31st is the World Backup Day. No, it’s not an offically  holiday, but that doesn’t diminish the importance on the day. We all have  data that is very important to us. This data takes many forms and if we  lost it, could greatly affect our businesses. World Backup Day, March 31st,  is a day set to remind us to backup our data. If you haven’t already, why  not? Have you seen the backup options over at turnkeyvault.com? Something  to fit everyones situation.

So April 1st comes around, with March now in the rear view mirror – and people shout April Fools – but if you don’t want to be the subject of a tragic April Fools day gone bad we hope you took a moment to make sure you business has a backup plan, and that its working.  Every year we replace computers, servers, laptops and more – so its easy to forget to make sure each new device is being backed up – but March 31st is a great day to remind yourself each year to double check them all in your office.

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In the past, I’ve spoke to you about purchasing backup software. I’ve compared having backup software for your server like having car insurance. I’ve also spoken with you about the different type of backup technologies that exist. I went into details about a few different types of technologies. These were the following:

 

 

1. Bare Metal backup/restores
2. Cloud Backups
3. Virtual Server backups

For more information, check it out at TurnkeyVault.com

You can read about these technologies on our blog here For this article, I will be talking about a new type of backup software. A brand new product that I’m very excited to announce that combines many of the different backup technologies and creates a new, hybrid backup system. A system that allows you to ensure business continuity for your customers. For those of you who do not know what business continuity is, I shall explain. Business continuity means that your business goes on even if your systems fail. Restores are therefore fast and even if the system is down, continuity means you still have access to key piece of business data. Maintaining business continuity should be one of your main focuses as a business owner.

 

Our new backup product helps to ensure business continuity by combing the best of the backup technologies presently on the market. To do this, our software must have address the following needs

 

1. Ability to create server backups and workstation backups
2. Ability to create backups locally as well as to the cloud
3. Ability to only backup files that have changed in a system

In order to show you the greatness of the new software, I will go through each ability listed above and show how these 3 key areas combine to provide you with unparalleled continuity for you business. Shall we begin?

 

Ability to create server backups and workstation backups

 

Server backups are the main component of any data protection installation. Servers are where all of the data resides. This includes current, recent and in many cases, older data. The server also is where operating systems, applications, configurations and system states reside. Ensuring these assets is the main job for any business owner or solution provider. Now while most business owners ensure that server backups exist, many over look their individual workstations. This includes the workstations in the field, home offices and satellite facilities. The data on theses PCS and workstations may contain important projects, critical documents, and irreplaceable creative works. Sometimes, even workstations in the home office or headerquarters may be overlooked, despite being tied directly into the corporate network.

 

Ensuring that you have backups for both the server and the workstations is one step to ensuring business continuity. Our new backup product allows for backups of the servers and the workstations. The backups can be stored locally on an in house backup server or backed up directly to the cloud, otherwise known as a disk-to-disk-to-cloud backup solution. This ensures that even if your local backup system fails, you will have another set of copies of backups stored in the cloud that you can easily deploy. This leads us directly into the next feature that is required for business continuity.

 

Ability to create backups locally as well as to the cloud

 

Until rather recently, in the last few years, the main option for backups were to do it all locally or on-premises. The backups were usually stored on a disk or even an additional tape drive. Larger businesses may have had another tier that sent backups off site for achriving. Research conducted by technology research firm of Gartner Inc, shows  that backups in an average data center only worked about 85% of the time. Remote offices were even worse at 75% of the time. Making matters worse, is that you do not know if you have a bad backup until you attempt to restore it.  With the introduction of the cloud, the game has changed. You can now backup fast and secure to a hybrid cloud backup. What do I mean by hybrid cloud backup?

 

The hybrid cloud backup or disk-to-disk-to-cloud, allows you to maintain an initial disk backup, which is still down in house, but has an additional tier that stores the backup in the cloud. This tends to be the best of both worlds as the cloud tier is scalable, easy to manager and guarantees data restores properly. Restoring from the cloud is perfect for remote offices that aren’t near the local disk backup. The main benefit of being able to restore a backup from disk or tape, is the speed of the restore. Our new backup software addresses the speed issue by only restoring the changed blocks on a system, which increases the speed of the restoration dramatically. How does only backing up the files that have changed on a system speed up the restore process?

 

Ability to only backup files that have changed in a system

 

What determines the speed of a backup? One factor would be the speed of the connection between the device or devices being backed up and the backup device itself. Another factor would also be the speed of the I/O(Input/Output) determined by the quickness of the disk. However, the biggest factor of them all when addressing the speed of a backup is the amount of data being backed up. Now, when you first create a backup, there is little that you can do to change the size of the data volume except for compression. The intitial backup copies the entire data set. There isn’t any way around this. Once the full backup is in place, maintaining the backup up is done by sending over only the changes of files.

 

Our new software does things a bit differently. Instead of backing up the changes to the file, the software instead only sends over changes to the blocks. Blocks are much smaller than a typical file. To put this in perspective, say you have a word document that is 300 KB in size. You edit the file and change one word in the file. A typical backup system will see the file has been changed and resend that entire file over to the backup software. That essentially won’t change the size of the file. What our new software does is looks at the changed block, representing the one word and send that over to the backup. This may not sound like a lot, but say you have thousands of files and have to resend every file, every time it has been changed. The size of the data will add up very quickly.  The sending over of updates to only blocks of data is called Deep deduplication. Deep deduplication allows for a great savings in disk, or if you’re backing up in the cloud, service costs. It also means your network isn’t bogged down by having to transport massive data sets. Also, these smaller data volumes allow for increase longevity to your local backup system as you’re taking maximum advantage of your space.

 

 

To summarize, our new backup software addresses the main issues when discussing business continuity. Having business continuity for any business is a competivite advantage that every serious business owner must consider. Having a disaster recovery solution in place that you can deploy in a matter of minutes, will go a long way to ensure that your business is running at optimum efficiency. We’re calling our new backup software(Insert name of backup software). You should head over to (Insert URL to backup software) purchase some business continuity insurance for your business

 

For more information, check it out at TurnkeyVault.com

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If you’ve been a follower of the blog, you know that I’ve written a post on the importance of having backups of your data. I compared having a backup solution to having insurance on your automobile. This post was a generalized approach to backup solutions. For this week’s post, I will delve deeper into the realm of backups. More specifically, we will discuss the different types of server backup options that currently exist. This post will be of a more technical nature then my previous posts, but I assure you, if you stay for the entire post, you will have a better idea of server backups and the myriad of options that are available to you.  

 For more info and to setup cloud backups for your server, visit http://www.turnkeyvault.com

 

Shall we begin? There are a few different methods that exist for creating server backups:

 

1. Bare metal backup/restore
2. Cloud backups
3. Virtual server backups

 

I will go through of each these methods to give you an inside look into each option. Let’s dive right in with bare metal backups and restores.  

 

Bare Metal backup/restore

 

In disaster recovery, a bare metal restore is the process of reformatting a computer from scratch after a catastrophic failure. This process entails reinstalling the operating systems, applications and if possible, restoring data and all settings. Bare metal restores allows you to restore to an uncofingured server as the backup includes all information to setup the machine and move the data over. This results in a ready to go backup server.

 

At a deeper level, bare metal backup/restores work by taking a “snapshot” of the server. This snapshot includes every file and folder that exists on the server including all hidden files and directories. This snapshot is then pushed to an offsite location where the entire image can be deployed at a moment’s notice.  If you have a Windows server or even a Linux server, bare metal restores will copy the entire operating system structure. Usually, these backup images are the rather large as they are an exact replica of the your running server.

 

For example, let’s say that you have a full power outage at your company. Upon the power returning, you realize that your main hosting server has lost all data. It can’t find the boot record to load the operating system and all files have been removed. Since you’ve purchase a bare metal backup solution, which you can view our current offers here: http://turnkeyvault.com/server_backups.php , you simply login to your bare metal software. You then select the server you want to restore and viola. The operating system is re-installed with all applications. It’s as if you’ve never had the major system failure

 

Cloud backups

 

When I say cloud backup, what immediately comes to mind? I personally imagine a white, puffy cloud in the sky that resembles a vault. Was that what came to mind for you? If not, that’s quite all right. A cloud backup is a piece of software that takes a snapshot of your server and then stores the backup in the cloud. What exactly do I mean by the cloud? The cloud is a piece of software that is stored off-site that can be accessed from any location. Cloud backups allow for greater flexibitily then a local disk or tape backup. A disk backup or tape backup has the limitation of only being able to access the data locally. This could mean data is being stored on a different server that is stored in your local office. In order to access the backup, you would have to drive into your office, connect the two servers and then migrate the data over.

 

Do you already see the disadvantage to this type of local system? What if you’re traveling and have a disaster and need to restore your data? How will you do it if your business only keeps local backups? This is where a cloud backup comes into play. Since the backup is stored offsite and can be access via an internet connection, you can restore your data from anywhere in the world. This allows for greater flexibility in your backup solution. Also, another disadvantage to local backups is the size or space requirements for the backups. Say you have 1TB of data you need backed up, but you only have 500GB worth of space. What will you do? More than likely, you would just add a new device to your backup software. This may be an additional hard drive, a USB drive or maybe a network attached storage.

 

Well with a cloud backup, depending on your vendor, you can usually just increase the resources of the cloud storage to accommodate your increasing space needs. This allows for you to be able to rapidily add more space to your backup server to accomdate  your increasing data space requirements. Now, in no way am I advocating that you should remove your local backup options, but instead add another layer of backups to your current system such as a cloud backup. Having local backups and cloud backups are a GREAT way to maintain business continuity.

 

 

Virtual server backups

 

Virtualization is one of the best things ever done for servers, as it allows for one physical server to act as several servers. This dramatically reduces computing costs and boosts efficiency. One of the main challenges with the backup of virtulized servers is the backup of the virtual servers data and the main hostnode data. When I say, hostnode, I’m referring to the original server that contains all of the virtualized servers. The reason you need to keep backups for both the host and the virtual servers can best be summed up with an example.

 

Your business has decided to virtualize all of the servers in your office. Your IT department recommends going with VMware. Fast forward a few months and you have a major system failure within the host node. Your main hard drive dies and you lose all virtual servers that were stored on the server. Luckily, you have a backup of the hostnode and just restore the backup for the hostnode, however, upon checking the server, you notice an error. Sure, your main host node sytem files were restored, but all your virtual servers data is missing.

 

This example illustratres the need to have a backup of the physical hostnode and the virtual servers. The physical hostnode contains the system files that VMWare needs to run. The virtual servers would also need a backup to restore the user data that has been created in the virtualized server. Usually the virtualized servers have a different type of operating system then a normal, non virtualized server would contain. You would need some virtualized server backup software  that can handle creating backups of the virtualized servers as well as, the main host node itself.

 

You could have local backups of both the hostnode and the virtualized server that you can restore. You could go the bare metal route for the host node as well as virtualized servers or even the cloud backup method. It’s just important that you have backups of both the node and the virtual servers.

 

 For more info and to setup cloud backups for your server, visit http://www.turnkeyvault.com

Hopefully after reading this post, you feel a bit better about the different backup options that exist and can come up with a backup solution that fits your company needs.

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Jeremy here again and I just have one quick question for you: Do you have insurance on your data? You may be thinking what exactly I mean by insurance of your data. It’s not like you’ve bought a car and have to pay car insurance every month. No, what I’m referring to is assurance that your data is 100% safe and secure should any issue arise and the need arise to restore your data.

 

What do I mean by any issue? A few examples are listed below:

 

1. Your site gets exploited and all files removed
2. The server your site is located on crashes
3. Someone accidentally terminated your account by mistake
4. Your main hard drive becomes corrupted and all data is lost

 

Those examples stated above are just a few of many that could occur on your server. These issues won’t just occur on a dedicated server, but it could occur on a Virtual Private Server(VPS), a shared server such as a reseller server or SEO server, but for shared servers, we will assume for this article, that you’ve been hosting with your reseller account/basic hosting/SEO accounts with Turnkey Internet where all our shared servers are backed up on a weekly and monthly basis. The backups are pushed off to a different server and stored away from the server containing your data and stored in a safe location, but what about customers with dedicated servers or a VPS? What do those clients do if they haven’t purchase any backup software(insurance) for their server? What happens if they crash?

 

You see, most clients who come to us stating they need a backup of their server because they’ve made some change and corrupted their system, are a step behind the ball. Do you really want to have to tell your clients/customers, that their data is lost because no backup was made? You basically have egg on your face at that point. So what do you do? At this point, your options are pretty limited. You would have to have some local backups stored on your local PC or Mac that you can upload back to the server and restore.  Instead of focusing on what to do after, we will focus on what to do to prevent this from every occurring.

 

Some clients that I’ve worked with assume that we keep a backup of all of their data from day 0 and that’s just not the case because data can only be stored so long – but generally a month to three months, or more is common.   Let’s keep the focus on a VPS or Dedicated server. When checking out on our site, Turnkey Internet, for a VPS or Dedicated Server, backup software options are always presented. Some clients take advantage of this and purchase backup software or insurance for their data, but on a few occasions, you will find a user who doesn’t. Maybe they think that they won’t put a lot of data on the server and they won’t need backups or maybe they just feel that they will never have need for backups. That, my friend, is a very foolish way to view the matter.

 

Let me frame it in another way that can really ground this for you. Let’s say you go purchase a new car and do not purchase insurance. You drive off the lot and right as you’re making a right to take your new car back home, BAM, an accident occurs. Now, if you have full insurance on the car, it’s no big deal and your insurance covers the entire matter for you minus the deductible, but what if you don’t have insurance on the car? You have to pay for your own damage on your car and possibly the other persons damage to their vehicle. You could be out thousands of dollars for which all could have been avoided by having insurance on your vehicle.

 

This is the same for your data. Having backup software is like having insurance for your data. Should an issue arise that you need to restore data, your data is safe and secure on an entirely different server. You won’t have to worry about egg being on your face as your data will be 100% secure

 

Do you currently have insurance for your data?  If not, you may want to consider viewing some of our backup options at: http://turnkeyvault.com/server_backups.php

 

Until next time

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