Posts Tagged ‘Disaster Recovery’

 

Small companies should consider cloud-based disaster recovery programs

Thursday, November 29th, 2012 by Dr. GoGrid

In the past, every new technology implemented by a company needed to have a positive return on investment or reduce costs in some way for it to have a sound impact on an organization. While saving money is still important today, it is not necessarily the main reason companies are deploying innovative solutions.

As new cyber dangers and natural disasters pressure small organizations to be prepared with robust disaster recovery and business continuity plans, decision-makers are turning to cloud computing for scalable and automated environments, according to a study by InformationWeek Reports. Since the cloud comes in a variety of forms, enabling executives to leverage on- or off-site structures to host mission-critical information, small companies can use the services to promote long-term safety.

Small companies should consider cloud-based disaster recovery programs

The study revealed that the cloud is also raising awareness of the importance of businesses continuity and disaster recovery programs, as 67 percent of respondents said they currently have a plan in place, while another 23 percent have a strategy to launch an initiative within the next 12 to 24 months. Only 10 percent of respondents lack any plans.

The survey also found that 17 percent of decision-makers are using cloud-based services to enhance disaster recovery programs, while another 26 percent are considering doing so.

Why use the cloud for disaster recovery?
In addition to the scalable and financial benefits associated with incorporating cloud computing into a business continuity strategy, executives can also ensure their initiatives are on pace with evolving demands through frequent testing programs, InformationWeek Reports said. While legacy disaster recovery tools often enable companies to check operations every so often, the cloud provides decision-makers with the ability to ensure sensitive applications and data are recoverable at any time.

InformationWeek Reports said cloud-based business continuity programs enable small firms to have end-to-end backup orchestrated for their entire data center. This lets executives migrate massive volumes of records to the public or private cloud on demand.

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You Don’t Need a Superstorm: Disaster Recovery Basics

Monday, November 12th, 2012 by Scott Pankonin

In this blog post, I’m going to discuss disaster recovery. After superstorm Sandy on the East Coast, there were people without power weeks after the storm. Data centers were affected by the storm as well. And although GoGrid’s East Coast data center didn’t experience an outage, some providers did. So it is timely to consider geographically redundant solutions rather than wait for the next superstorm.

Geographic Redundancy

There are three basic strategies you can implement today on GoGrid to make your application better able to recover from a data center outage: cold standby, warm standby, and full geographic-redundancy with multiple active data centers. Let’s start off with a definition:

Redundancy: (noun) the ability of an application or system to resist the failure of one or more constituent parts, or recover quickly from such failure.

Systems administration and IT management boils down to that proverbial 3:00am phone call. Your application is down. How do you respond? Having the proper plan and appropriate recovery assets in place is the key to surviving this all-too-real scenario. How current are your backups? Do you have standby servers already in place? If not, how quickly can you bring new ones online?

It’s pretty standard to have offsite backups. If the offsite backups are in a secondary data center, they can be used to springboard reconstituting your application. GoGrid offers two products that make this process easy to implement: (more…) «You Don’t Need a Superstorm: Disaster Recovery Basics»

CloudLink Now Available to All GoGrid Customers

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 by Michael Sheehan

CloudLink, a dedicated, private connection between GoGrid data centers, is GoGrid’s newest product that comes with some exciting new features. After being in private beta for several months, is now available to all GoGrid customers via the GoGrid portal. Customers who purchase it will have the ability to link servers from our US-West-1 Data Center to our US-East-1 Data Center via a dedicated, secure and redundant line. Customers are now be able to easily connect their servers via the private network between our Data Centers.

How do I get it?

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The first step is to purchase the product. We have added a link within the GoGrid portal where you can click to order CloudLink. After clicking on the link, you will be presented with a form where you can select the desired bandwidth. It will take at least 2 business days to activate CloudLink on your account – once it is ready, you will get a message from GoGrid with a CloudLink welcome letter.

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Learn How a GoGrid Customer Created a Multiple Data Center Routing & Failover Infrastructure Environment

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 by Michael Sheehan

We absolutely LOVE hearing how GoGrid customers are using our cloud solutions to create unique “cloud fingerprints” and environments using the features and data centers of GoGrid. Paul Trippett just published a very interesting write-up of an infrastructure environment that addresses many of the common concerns facing any company looking to provide a highly-redundant infrastructure while also ensuring a solid Service Level Agreement (SLA) for their customers.

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You can find Paul’s original write-up titled “Utilizing GoGrid’s Multiple Data Centers for Routing and Failover” on his site. With his permission, we have reposted the article so that others can learn, mimic and build upon his unique scenario.

At the beginning of the year one of our customers asked us if we can provide an SLA for StormRETS and with it, the sound gritting teeth suddenly echoed around the room. As you can imagine, this caused more questions than which we actually had answers for:

blockquote_2 What kind of SLA did we want to provide and what could we realistically provide?

Our hosting provider, at the time, had an SLA which entailed “We don’t give any guarantee that your servers will be available, but if for any reason they are unavailable we will get the back up and running as soon as we can.”, erm, how on earth can we build a SLA based on that. It was decided at this time we would migrate our servers to another hosting provider, one at least with a SLA we can build on and a company we can actually contact directly should a problem arise.

(more…) «Learn How a GoGrid Customer Created a Multiple Data Center Routing & Failover Infrastructure Environment»

Partner Webinar: “Disaster Recovery in the Cloud” – ANX eBusiness & GoGrid – 2/26/10

Thursday, February 25th, 2010 by Michael Sheehan

ANX_eBusiness_logo On Friday, February 26, one of our GoGrid Partners, ANX eBusiness will be hosting a webinar titled “Disaster Recovery in the Cloud“.

The description of the Webinar is as follows:

With the increasing importance of information technology for the continuation of business critical functions, combined with a transition to an around-the-clock economy, the importance of protecting an organization’s data and IT infrastructure in the event of a disruptive situation has become an increasing and more visible business priority in recent years. It is estimated that most large companies spend between 2% and 4% of their IT budget on disaster recovery planning.  Recent technological advancements, primarily with cloud computing, allow more companies to afford and be better prepared for the day disaster strikes.  This webinar demonstrates new approaches for implementing a powerful yet cost effective disaster recovery program in the cloud.

Webinar details:

DATE: Friday, February 26, 2010
TIME: 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST (11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PST)
HOST: ANX eBusiness
REGISTRATION: To register, please visit this page

More Information about ANX eBusiness

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