BDP Proves Its Worth Following Hurricane Sandy
BDP Proves Its Worth Following Hurricane Sandy by UCStrategies Staff
The founder and CEO of Alpha NetSolutions, Tim Shea, has said that due to the great advances, enhancements and improvements in cloud computing, and its Backup Disaster Recovery (BDP), Hurricane Sandy passed without causing very much disruption to the company's running.
Whilst discussing Hurricane Sandy and its impact on the U.S.'s East Coast, Shea stated that the company “had a few calls” but that “no one […] lost data.” Alpha NetSolutions' managed services clients were prepared to deal with calls and resolving problems, and the correct solutions had been prearranged and put in place to meet them.
Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast this week creating large-scale damage. Shea added, “None of my customers are in fear of losing their data. If something happens we know what to do. We have been through this so many times.” Cloud networks, for the most part, appear to have held up.
Cloud computing allows for the hosting of (data center) assets off-premise in data centers which can be remote and spread far apart, and can therefore easily prevent data from being damaged as the result of disasters; even hurricanes hundreds of miles wide.
Zeus Kerravala, the founder and principal analyst with a networking and cloud research firm, ZK Research, said: “One of the most understated uses for the cloud is disaster recovery. The cloud is built for back up and recovery, with geographically disbursed networks.”
Michael Cohn, the senior vice president of Cloud Sherpas (a Google partner delivering Google Apps and other products to cloud model customers), stated that few problems were encountered when considering network availability: “With Google, data doesn't live in any data center. It's fragmented and distributed in multiple data centers.”
Similar to Google, Rackspace data centers are distributed across the world, enabling operability of networks in times of disaster. The CTO of Rackspace, John Engates, stated: “We have the tools now to build our disaster recovery using the cloud. People are going to think about having a disaster recovery in the cloud because of the hurricane this week.”
Cloud computing is relied upon by every single customer of Alpha NetSolutions; this includes Microsoft Exchange. Shea stated, “If you have two feet of water in your data center, your servers and backup are gone; but if you are on a cloud platform, you just drive to Starbucks or McDonalds and you are up and running.”
Hosted Exchange is a part of Alpha NetSolutions' standard managed services package. Shea says, “Hosted Exchange is so important to us, we give it away with our support plan. Some people think cloud is about saving money, but it's about a more robust platform that costs less. You couldn't afford to put in the redundancy you have in a cloud solution with an on-premise solution and make it accessible to so many people regardless of their location.”
Six years ago, things were certainly different. Back then, Shea says, tape backup was depended upon too heavily, and it was simply too unreliable: “We used to cross our fingers. With tape we would be praying we would be able to get the data back. We never felt comfortable. It was pretty bad back then. A lot of times my guys wouldn't want me to know what kind of problems we were having with this stuff. Today, it's just no big deal.”
Advances in BDR has meant that not a single customer has lost a file in the last four years.
The BDR services offered by Alpha NetSolutions means that the recovery of data for customers is very simple. Shea says, “A big part of our managed services is getting our clients to standardize best practices with the same level of fault tolerance, antivirus, battery backup, redundant ISPs. All of that is part of our standard managed services practice. Every one of our clients gets our backup disaster recovery [BDR] service. Ten years ago, every one of our clients was a one off. Today, we have a single standard best practice.”
Services such as StorageCraft's Shadow Protects, hosting from Rackspace, and its most recent virtulization technology, are just some of the products offered by Alpha NetSolutions. Data can also be virtualized in the cloud, and as a result, customers can be (according to Shea) “back up in ten minutes.” (CY) Link