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When Was The Last Time You Did a Restore?

Posted on November 29, 2011 by admin

-Thanks to our partners at Asigra for featuring this article in their November 2011 corporate newsletter –

Working in the backup, recovery and restore industry, I’ve come to the sad realization that many organizations, both big or small, feel adequately secure having any sort of backup solution on hand – then something happens and they try and restore their data.

In the last little while, I’ve come across several business owners who thought that they had a great backup and recovery process in place for their organization – that in the event of a data loss, they could easily and seamlessly restore their data. I use the word “thought” as they recently found out that although they did indeed have a backup process in place, the backups were either 1) failing 2) not providing sufficient protection for all their data or 3) they simply couldn’t restore the data they needed.

Despite what these owners thought, their backup and recovery process wasn’t protecting them. Unfortunately, they found out the hard way that it is not about the backup – it’s all about the recovery. Although painful, this did identify a need for a better data protection strategy and created an opportunity for Datotel to speak with them about a cloud backup and recovery solution with the proven ability to recover. This kind of data loss event didn’t happen again. They now realize that it isn’t about the backup…it’s about the ability to recover that’s vital!

One of the leading mistakes an organization makes is considering recovery as part of their backup plan. This type of thinking is backwards. Backup should actually be treated as part of a bigger disaster recovery plan.

The most granular way to describe data recovery is the process of retrieving lost data from damaged, failed, corrupted or inaccessible secondary storage media when, for some reason, it cannot be accessed in the conventional way. Fortunately, thanks to data recovery technology, in most instances, data loss can be recovered… with the right tools.

There are many technical solutions from tape to cloud-based backup with pros and cons to each; but any backup and recovery solution is no good if it isn’t adequately maintained or checked on a regular basis. Organizations change over time, and whether you’re conducting backup and recovery yourself, or relying on an outside resource, the backup and recovery process needs to adapt to meet those changing needs. Data backup is an insurance plan, and with any insurance plan, you are looking to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss. But it isn’t enough to just have an insurance plan; you need a recovery plan as well. Unfortunately, many people are not that concerned about the recovery plan until it is too late. The focus has always been on data backup instead of on the reason WHY to backup data – to recover and restore the data when needed.

Without ensuring you can successfully restore your data with your current backup solution, you are essentially ignoring the risks involved with data loss, instead of mitigating it. Organizations that play with fire eventually get burned. According to IDC, 6% of all PCs will suffer an episode of data loss in any given year. That translates to 4.6 million data loss episodes. Don’t be one of the ones that can’t recover. To ensure you can recover, ask yourself the following:

- Can you ensure data integrity by checking for corrupt data?
- Can you run a restore simulation to ensure data restorability?
- When was the last time you verified that all aspects of your data protection are in place and being met?

If it has been a while, maybe today would be a good day to try a restore, before you find yourself in a tight spot.

Thanks for reading,
David

@ddbrown

Posted in Asigra, Datavaulting, Security | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Addressing Data Storage Needs Without Increasing Capacity

Posted on September 19, 2011 by David Brown

Today’s companies, regardless of size or industry, are being challenged with the exponential growth of data and how to store the data in the most cost-effective manner.

In speaking with other CEOs about data management issues, many of them had received new storage requests from their IT team in recent weeks. In several cases, the IT Director made the request without first doing a discovery on the data and answering some basis questions, such as:

  • What is the current rate of the data growth?
  • What is the age of the data?
  • Are there older segments of data that can be archived to less expensive storage platforms?
  • Have the files being stored been de-duplicated?
  • Are there files that no longer need to be stored at all? i.e., images and music.
  • What is the cost of storing the files?

When the data has been thoroughly examined and questions answered, a real cost can be attributed to the organizations data; the resulting effect is better information and more informed purchasing decisions.

At Datotel, we use the Asigra LAN Storage Discovery tool to locate areas of data growth and find ways to help our clients optimize data, both before and after the software is used. LAN Discovery helps enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs, such as Datotel) categorize and assess the storage cost of each piece of data prior to either long-term archive or storage. Since all data does not carry equal value in the eyes of the customer, this assessment capability allows us to balance the value of our customers’ data to the cost of storing and protecting it. We can then use alternative storage platforms or backup and recovery methods to best meet the clients goals. LAN Discovery can also be run at intervals to gauge data growth or shrinkage within the entire customer environment. These reports can be used as metrics to better understand the end user environment for backup and planning purposes.

When trying to determine a cost for storing the data, it’s important to note that this kind of activity should be a part of a larger data storage and archival strategy, involving not only the types of data, but also the volume and age of the data as well as the removal of data that has aged.

Until next time,
- David
@ddbrown

Posted in Asigra, Cloud Computing, Datavaulting, Hardware | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Datotel Named To Inc. 5000 List for 2011

Posted on August 23, 2011 by admin

We’re pleased to announce that, for the 2nd year in a row, Datotel has been named
to the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America:

ST. LOUIS, AUGUST 23, 2011 – St. Louis-based Datotel, LLC, a state-of-the-art cloud computing and colocation provider, is being named today to the Inc. 5000 exclusive ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. Datotel was recognized by the magazine, along with other independent companies, for achieving outstanding business growth over the previous three years.

“We are honored to be included on this year’s Inc. 5000 list and are thankful for the dedication and hard work of our employees in growing Datotel as well as the continued commitment and support of our clients,” said David Brown, CEO of Datotel. “In 2004, we started with the dream of being the leading IT services provider for businesses and organizations in St. Louis, and continue to strive for that mission every day.”
Datotel continues its growth plans in 2011 with the recent opening of a second location in Chicago to join its present headquarters in downtown St. Louis. The decision to expand regionally was made to further meet the needs of clients seeking disaster recovery (DR) solutions, including backup services for cloud computing applications.

“We understand that disaster recovery solutions are critically important to many of our clients, from small- and medium-sized businesses to enterprise-level firms,” said Brown. “As cloud environments continue to grow and evolve, we are able to help our clients fully realize the productivity and efficiency of cloud computing while maintaining security and on-demand accessibility.”

Datotel ranked 2,209 on the fifth annual Inc. 5000 for 2011 with a three-year growth trend of 113 percent, closing 2010 with revenue exceeding $6 million. Client acquisitions in health care, financial services and nonprofit organizations have driven the majority of growth over the last year. Read the Inc. 5000 Datotel Profile here.

Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, can be found at www.inc.com/5000.

Methodology
The 2011 Inc. 500 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2007 to 2010. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2007. Additionally, they had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2010. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2007 is $100,000; the minimum for 2010 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.’s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at www.inc.com/500.

About Inc. Magazine
Founded in 1979 and acquired in 2005 by Mansueto Ventures LLC, Inc. (www.inc.com) is the only major business magazine dedicated exclusively to owners and managers of growing private companies that delivers real solutions for today’s innovative company builders. With a total paid circulation of 710,106, Inc. provides hands-on tools and market-tested strategies for managing people, finances, sales, marketing, and technology. Visit us online at www.inc.com.

About Datotel, LLC
St. Louis-based Datotel is a provider of cloud computing environments and colocation services from its carrier-class data center facility, complemented by a full suite of IT services to manage technology systems. Datotel has a $10 million state-of-the-art colocation facility managed and designed to provide IT infrastructures and systems a secure, stable and highly available environment. Datotel does regular work for organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to not-for-profits. The company can be reached at 1-877-241-9101 or www.datotel.com.

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Attack of the Technology Monster

Posted on July 27, 2011 by admin

– guest post by Michael Chua, Solutions Engineer –

Many of us in the IT world have been there before: we see the shiniest, newest, glitziest piece of technological wizardry and we MUST have it. We figure out a way to finagle it into the budget, network infrastructure and justify it to ourselves that this shiny, new toy will have a positive ROI very soon.

Then, reality sets in; management asks for reasoning behind the expenses and your explanation doesn’t fly. You’ve succumbed to the technology monster! You’re a technology addict and you may have just put your job at risk because of it.

Our staff has seen first-hand that the technology monster is alive and well out there – in small businesses, medium-sized firms and large corporations. Recently, we worked with a non-for-profit organization with these needs: internal networking, email, file storage, light databases, mobile workforce nothing unusual in that list. However, once our solutions team took a closer look at the environment, well — that’s when we recognized that the technology monster had been at work.

Their environment consisted of: 30+ vm servers in the VMWare environment, latest version of VMWare, clustered Exchange environment with 2 CAS and 2 DAG servers for under 100 users. Server 2008 R2 datacenter with Exchange server 2010 Enterprise, 3 physical server cluster, multi-terabyte SAN, 2 external low-terabyte NAS, BES Enterprise latest version (of course) and BB units all serviced in-house (batteries, spare parts, etc.).
The organization’s workstations used to be old Dells with Windows 2k/256 or 512 MB of RAM. But, that hardware was left behind in favor of new Intel i7 laptops with separate 1 GB video memory graphics cards, 128 or 256 GB SSDs and 8 GB of memory, which is like going from driving a Model A to a Porsche! A technology upgrade was warranted, but jumping up that many levels and going all out with the new laptops wasn’t necessary.

Why do I bring up this story? In my career that started shortly before IBM’s PC was introduced (the good old days!), the most common refrain heard from my fellow IT colleagues was “if I could get rid of the end users, my job would be perfect”. Well, that may have been the sentiment, but the reality was that without those end users, there was little need for IT support. Unfortunately, this was simply the prevailing mood at the time: technology was deployed in a vacuum and for its own sake, without a sound business case and very little input from end users.

I believe that this thinking contributed to the tech bubble in the late 1990’s, and it was a painful experience when it finally burst. However, we can look back on that time now and see that the rise and fall was necessary to bring about a significant change in IT philosophy. The result has been good for the industry; businesses and end-users now demand real benefits from their technology and expect accountability from their technology providers.

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NAVIGATION

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