Sabado, Setyembre 8, 2012

Hurricane Isaac Update


Here is a live take a look at wind speeds as reported hint.fm/wind. This image shows the measured sustained wind speed in New Orleans at 10:00a.m. today.

Hurricane Isaac winds Aug 29, 10:00a.m.It's been a stressful couple of days for Global Data Vault, but situations are running smoothly. Since the storm approached, we reviewed the status of knowledge protection for all customers in the region that has been anticipated to be affected by Hurricane Isaac. We proactively contacted those which could possibly have needed help. We know their data protection schedules so we can compare the freshness of our own versions of the data to determine if support is needed. Because the storm hit, all data was current.
We’re already providing disaster recoveries to customers in New Orleans, and in some cases, we're also bringing their systems are now living in hosted environments on our Dallas data center. For the reason that storm progresses slowly, we plan to continue on this role not less than the subsequent few days.


The TV show Revolution – could it really happen?

Regarding green half a billion people lost power in India late last month. It had been very large electrical blackout ever affecting Ten % on the world’s population. The blackout extended almost 2,000 miles, as well as the impact was felt even within the usa since the data centers and India-based telemarketing companies were crippled and without power. Each of us haven’t experienced a blackout such as the one that occurred in India, the usa has our own share of electric company pressures. The continued ratchet up in power usage as well as the stress it places on our infrastructure is alarming. Having seen another notice from your state of Texas regarding stress put upon the ERCOT grid, and having lost power in our new office (NOT our DATA CENTER - see end of article on why we’re safe) 3 x within the first 5 months of transferring, one’s thoughts can’t help but look at the what if’s… and this foreboding twist is exactly the thought of NBC’s new televisionshow, Revolution. But could “Revolution” really happen? Or at a minimum the principle premise within the show the location where entire world goes dark in the total blackout?

Certainly there’s peace of mind in acknowledge that most data centers presupposed to have diesel powered generation capability backing them up. Each of them tout it as part of their marketing materials and claim to be infallible. Sure, that’s comforting, but consider what went down as soon as the Derecho storm ravaged Washington, DC - online retail giant Amazon.com’s data centers went offline leaving Netflix, Pinterest Instagram and Heroku inside of a panic. So… Is mostly a total blackout really that implausible? You function as the judge:

Granted this dramatic interpretation of what “could” happen is far fetched - certainly we’re not likely headed to total global blackout yet. But you can get legitimate concerns when protecting important computer data. Should the US got a massive outage, the particular grit of these diesel powered generators will surely be tested. If you experience an electricity failure that’s widespread, there’s someone, somewhere, who dropped some critical part of their data. It’s a safe and secure bet that net every data center that states be fully resilient really is. And even though their lights might well be on, their connectivity partner probably are not. And connectivity is also important when you’re evaluating the continuity of your data center or disaster recovery site.

Having power are some things. Having connectivity is actually. When your pipe to your data center is offline, same with your business. One fashion to further protect your corporation from a power interruption is usually to make certain your data center implements a Tier 1 network provider. Dig a little bit of deeper into the data center’s marketing material and determine what level of connectivity they prefer. Global Data Vault is contracted by way of a Tier 1 mobile phone network provider, Level 3 Communications. Tier 1 essentially considerably Level 3 doesn’t need to pay someone to talk with any two points around the world. In the event it thought has your body and mind whirling a tiny bit, here’s every link for a number of Tier 1 networks to be able to verify but if the data center is aligned with these tier 1 network providers, and whether Revolution is just another over-dramatized tv program.






Biyernes, Setyembre 7, 2012

A New SAN: The Gift that Keeps on Giving


You understand sense of excitement right after you will be making an acquisition of something you’ve had your skills on for a while and it’s tragedy in this now it’s yours? Well, our collective faces are grinning within the afterglow of the buying a brand new SAN (storagearea network) from HP. In the world of Global Data Vault, this SAN is the ultimate new hardware present we can easily give ourselves.

Let’s review this exciting technology and discuss how facilitates delivering better, faster, and even more reliable services for you.

In geek speak, SAN’s are enterprise-class, dedicated networks
offering entry to consolidated, block level data storage, and those are words that makes us happy. SAN’s are primarily used to make storage devices - like disk arrays - accessible to servers so that the devices appear as locally attached devices to your os. So aside from the colossal sophistication of what a SAN can do, it will allow Global Data Vault to take our level of service up a notch with added reliability, recovery speed, economies of scale and management features:

Reliability: It’s a dirty little secret among technology
service providers, but things break regularly. Premier data backup and disaster recovery companies (like Global Data Vault) have a huge system of fail safes when ever hardware goes bad in order that replacements are put into production seamlessly with out the first is effected. A SAN encapsulates most of the issues that will go awry and fixes every one of them on it's own, and creates incrementally better reliability. We like that.

Recovery speed: SAN’s facilitate
a bit more effective disaster recovery process. They may be better skilled at keeping multiple copies of customer data just because a SAN can span a distant location that houses another storage array. It enables storage replication through the disk array controllers, and that means after a disaster event, you are up and running faster than you might even think you’re ready for.

Economy of Scale: A SAN provides
more economical growth, allowing us to possess a much less expensive scalability option, which then we transfer those efficiencies in our customers. And that will give you something to smile about.

Management features: A SAN storage network simplifies storage administration
because it contains networking capabilities from it. Inside a lesser storage option, we would ought to logically separate the storage into different devices. The SAN manages to do it for us. Think of it in this way: A less sophisticated storage option would be just like having a parking zone loaded with a great deal of little buckets that we were pouring data into. A SAN allows us create highly virtualized storage pool that we can pour all the data into. The SAN is built to work out the separation logically plus much more effectively that people can ourselves.

We
opt for a SAN by HP for a number of reasons. Technical excellence, appropriate investment and superior support are keys. And yes it may be a “chicken vs. egg” thing, but we understand that although most business leaders ask the question, “How should i succeed?” the founders of HP instilled an alternative question in to the culture: “How will we contribute?”. Global Data Vault shares this approach and appreciate all the good it brings when our suppliers share this view as well.