StorageCraft Channel Update

by | Sep 12, 2017 | Latest News

In this update (HSR, MSP and more):

  • Welcome to the World of ShadowProtect MSP
  • Office 365 NEEDS backing up
  • Head Start Restore (HSR)
  • Replicate to Amazon S3 directly from ImageManager?
  • StorageCraft Maintenance Amnesty Promotion

Welcome to the World of ShadowProtect MSP

Since we announced our newfound partnership as being the exclusive ShadowProtect MSP distributor, we have had partners signing up in hordes. It’s a simple decision really – monthly billing only for what you have activated, the ability to create keys whenever you need to, licenses that belong to you and the hassle of managing renewals gone. As with everything ShadowProtect – we bill in New Zealand dollars, making life for you so much easier. If you want to know more, or if you want to get straight to it – drop us an email at StorageCraft and we’ll guide you through the next steps to get you started. It won’t take long, promise.

Office 365 NEEDS backing up

Human nature can be one of the most destructive acts to your data. The frequency at which we hear how often people have accidentally deleted a file, an angry ex employee on his way out wanting to clear their mailbox or simply someone gaining unauthorized access to company data and removing files, is phenomenal. Microsoft offers only limited recovery points to bring that data back and when the recovery point falls outside of the standard window that is offered, it becomes an IT Administrators nightmare of lost time and resource, to try and work out how to recover that information in the back-end.

StorageCraft makes it easy with automated daily backup of your Office 365 users by providing protection for:

  • Exchange – All email activities and Exchange data going back as long as needed or prescribed
  • Calendars and contacts Data – Saved for multiple previous revisions, edits and versions
  • OneDrive for Business – Everything that is needed from Office 365 processes is collected, encrypted, protected and readily available
  • SharePoint – Protection of base SharePoint organizational data
  • Public shared folders – Availability of all data that is in use in public shared folders across user defined time periods

The best part is the price. You get all of the above, with unlimited storage for just under $4.50 per user for first price-band (which then rapidly declines the more users you add). We know for a fact that for that cost and without the hassle of worrying about data, it makes it one of the most aggressively featured solutions on the market today.

Check out this quick video which explains the need, the service and the solution: Cloud Backup for Office 365 from StorageCraft. We can help! Just drop us a line and we’ll set you up with a portal to get started.

Head Start Restore (HSR)

We had a customer call us recently, looking for the ability to ‘auto-create’ a restore on a standby device, whilst their production server was still functioning. The intention was to offer a device that was as close to a ‘hot standby’ as possible. He was worried, proclaiming that the competition did it as a fancy addition to their primary product and it was a costly paid upgrade. He felt like he would lose the deal unless ShadowProtect could step up to the plate. Well…ShadowProtect COULD step up and in fact, have been doing so with HSR for many years – in addition HSR was completely free. HSR did exactly what he was after; it allowed him to start a restore operation on a new system while the original production server continued to run. This greatly reduced downtime associated with various fail-over operations, particularly for systems with very large storage systems and created his perfect standby environment AND allowed him to have an aggressively compelling and competitive final DR strategy and solution offering.

Here are some example scenarios;

  • Hardware Failure – While you repair a downed database server, the business won’t even notice it’s not available. Employees can still access the database because you’ve set up a temporary virtual machine (VM) with StorageCraft VirtualBoot technology. In this VM, changes to the database will continue being recorded and stored in incremental backups. You would then set up an HSR to the repaired database server. Once the most recent incremental backup from your temp VM is applied to your repaired server, finalize the HSR job, take the VM down, and bring up the database server—as if nothing happened (as far as your clients know, that is).
  • Planned Migration – Migrate a 2TB database server to a new environment without needing three days of downtime to get it done. While your database server continues to run, use HeadStart Restore to send a full backup image of this server’s disk and subsequent incrementals into a VM file. Once you’re ready to switch over, you’ll then apply the most recent incremental backup to your new server and bring it online. Use StorageCraft Hardware Independent Restore™ technology to get the migrated operating system to boot on the new machine.
  • Virtual Standby – Be prepared with a standby if your primary server fails. You can set up HSR to create your standby volume as a virtual disk and place it on an ESXi host. If the server does fail, then you finalize your HSR job (which stops adding changes to the volume) and reboot (with the help of the StorageCraft Recovery Environment). Bring your standby copy online as a replacement for the failed primary server.

Did we mention that HSR was completely free? Talk to us if you would like to discuss, how you can design in HSR to your backup strategy.

Replicate to Amazon S3 directly from ImageManager?

It’s possible! ImageManager can happily replicate to any destination target and leveraging the low cost and high availability of S3 infrastructure means you can have the assurance your offsite backup set is kept safe. Karl Thomson the New Zealand Pre-Sales Engineer has done an informative video explaining the concept, setup and configuration. You can check that out here: Replicate ShadowProtect backups safely and securely to Amazon S3 directly from ImageManager and whilst you’re at it, why not head over to the StorageCraft Youtube Channel, for lots of other content that will help in streamlining your ShadowProtect delivery.

StorageCraft Maintenance Amnesty Promotion

For the months of September and October StorageCraft will be running an Amnesty promotion for all ShadowProtect and SPX licenses with expired maintenance. Now is the time to get thoses licenses up-to-date and get access to the latest software updates and technical support from StorageCraft. There are also multi-year discounts available should you wish to renew for 2 or 3 years. Contact the Soft Solutions Sales Team to get a quote today. Excludes ShadowProtect IT Edition.

Soft Solutions Sales
Phone: 0-9-306 0450, Freephone: 0-800-733 233

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