Archive for August, 2010

Cloud Server Disaster Recovery

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

http://blogs.i365.com/data-protection/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/i365_Logo_Red_RGB_150.jpg

To make cloud server recovery easier, faster and less expensive, i365 announced additions to its EVault Remote Disaster Recovery (RDR) Service.

The Seagate company, provides professional-grade on-premise and cloud-connected storage solutions, and cloud-based storage and disaster recovery services, for SMBs. According to Karen Jaworski, Director of Product Management, i365, “EVault RDR is a managed hosted cloud-based service that helps organizations quickly recover critical applications after a disaster, enabling employees to remotely access those applications in a secure virtual environment. It’s designed to protect customers from the impact of site disasters, and to recover their critical applications, within the cloud, in 24 to 48 hours.”

“Backup and recovery has been a big pain point for companies of all types and sizes,” says Dines, Rachel, Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations, Forrester Research. “Moving to cloud-based not just for backup but also to run recovery servers is making enterprise-class D/R available to companies of all sizes, and making it much faster, easier and less expensive.”

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Rackspace Hosting Reports Second Quarter 2010 Results

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Rackspace announced financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2010.  Here were the results:

  • Net revenue of $187.3 million grew 23.2% year-over-year and 4.8% from Q1 2010
  • Adjusted EBITDA (1) of $62.2 million grew 29.2% year-over-year and 4.7% from Q1 2010
  • Achieved adjusted EBITDA margin of 33.2%, up from 31.7% year-over-year and in-line with Q1 2010
  • Net income of $11.2 million grew 60.2% year-over-year and 14.1% from Q1 2010
  • Generated $15.4 million of Adjusted Free Cash Flow for the quarter and $16.9 million for the first six months of 2010
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Cloud Hosting Uptime vs Cloud Hosting Availability

Monday, August 9th, 2010

I have to get this clear from the start; availability is not equal to uptime. You want to have a high availability, but the uptime of the server is not that important. When only one server is used however, availability is somewhat related to uptime (because there is no other server that can handle the requests when the server is down).

But remember that a Windows server in general needs to be rebooted every month (because of new updates). So if the uptime of the web hosting provider’s web servers are longer than a month, it can be an indication of that the web hosting provider is not security aware (but it does not necessarily mean that!).

Patching should of course happen when the load is as low as possible, to not interrupt visitors of your website. Ask the web hosting provider when the apply patches.

Web servers may crash. If/when that (!) happens, what will happen to your website? Will your website go down, and for how long? Or is there another server that can host the websites? Maybe the end-user won’t even notice when a server becomes unavailable (there are different ways to do this, but it usually costs more than $300 per year, which is the price range this article focuses on).

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