Some highlights we took from the event, includes:

1. More than 50% of the IT execs and MSPs we met wanted to use virtualized environments for disaster recovery in the next 6 months or so. And many focused on speed to recovery or a near-instant failover into their private cloud environments.

2. Many MSPs want to re-position themselves to offer disaster recovery services with more focus on business continuity and service recovery, not just backup data restoration. Virtualization based Disaster Recovery, in particular, attracted MSPs as it allowed them to perform rapid disaster recovery shrinking the CAPEX required with traditional DR.

3. Looks like MSPs these days talk less about traditional backup and discuss more about business continuity services to their SMB customers. Infact, many indicated that they are making changes in the backup infrastructure to accommodate for the introduction of image based backups into their process and are actively moving business critical applications (such as MS Exchange, SQL, Kaseya Server etc) to disk based backup solutions.

4. Based on number of backup vendors this year at Kaseya Partner Pavilion, it was obvious that more and more MSPs are keen to offer cloud-based disaster recovery and online backup services to their customers. Also, for vendors like us the market is getting hot and extremely competitive.

The industry is now increasingly in agreement that virtualization will redefine the SMB data protection landscape, but there is still some debate around what exactly is the right architecture for these BDR platforms which could handles today’s expectations for an always-on environments.

We think we at Vembu have a compelling recipe for addressing the technical and economic barriers encompassing the complete backup and disaster recovery requirements in complex SMB physical and virtual environments through multiple deployment options for MSPs. You can take a closer look at the latest release StoreGrid 4.2 to learn more on how we solve the recovery piece of the puzzle.

Thanks so much for your continued support and patience. Based on your valuable feedback, many new features are added and we firmly believe that this new release will bring more benefits to your business!

Here’s a heads up for what’s in store in the new release:

Support for Parallels Plesk – The much awaited integration of StoreGrid with Parallels Plesk’s web hosting control panel will support a domain level backup and restore capability. Initially, the Plesk integration will be available for Centos OS.

Multiple Storage Location – Using this feature StoreGrid will be able to utilize multiple storage volumes simultaneously and facilitate multi-tenant storage infrastructure as its backup data store.

High Performance Incremental Backups – An outstanding performance improvement will be noticed for large incremental backups with StoreGrid’s support for Inotify. With it’s integration with inotify module, what took 10 hours for an incremental, will now take just 1 hour for the same incremental.

Support for Windows Machine Backup – The Hosting Provider Edition’s OS support has been extended for Windows OS as well. StoreGrid will now support backup of Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and MySQL servers.

Support for VMware Backup – StoreGrid Hosting Edition now supports backing up multiple VMware images from a single StoreGrid agent installation. The agent can be installed in a standalone machine or in one of the VMware’s VM itself.

Improved Performance of cPanel Dump Process – Another milestone performance improvement, this time for the cPanel dump processes. Users will be able to see a 5X speed up in the dump processes of Account Settings and MySQL database in cPanel which in turn will result in faster cPanel backups.

Enhanced Integrations – StoreGrid seamlessly works with cPanel, Parallels Plesk, WHMCS and more.

We at Vembu, are driven by feedbacks and requests from our customers and partners. The earlier edition of Hosting Provider Edition v 5.0 had primarily targeted the needs of managed hosting providers. With the new Hosting Edition release, we bring in some more integrations and greater performance improvements keeping in mind the requirements of an ideal hosting environment. We look forward to more suggestions and feedbacks to constantly improve in our endeavor and provide better products.

If you have any questions on this release or upgrade process, please contact our 24/7 technical support team at storegrid-hosting@vembu.com

The new StoreGrid 4.2 BMR Plug-in can incrementally backup and fast restore a complete system with instant P2V support. By combining StoreGrid online backup solution with near-continuous disk imaging backup, MSPs and IT Service Providers can protect SMB businesses and offer disaster recovery by seamlessly restoring entire Windows server environment in the cloud or any virtualized environment.

StoreGrid 4.2 BMR Plug-in Key Highlights:

• Live Backups. Backup the entire system at run-time and ensure the recovery of operating system and applications without reinstalling any software. Create disk clones of your entire hard disk and replace it with a new one without reinstalling operating systems and applications, saving hours of effort.
• Disaster Recovery. In the event of unplanned downtime, you can ensure that the server is available to the end-user with StoreGrid virtualized backups.
• Smart P2V. Create multiple recovery points within a few minutes of each other when using a Smart P2V in StoreGrid.
• Disaster Prevention. IT service providers can test changes on a backed up image-level replica of the client’s production server in their virtual lab.
• Business Continuity. With StoreGrid’s near-continuous backup solution, you can failover your client’s entire Windows server environment in the event of a server failure.

StoreGrid BMR Plugin enables instant recovery to a virtual server so that in the event of a hard disk crash it is only a small delta restores that will be necessary to get that server up and running on a virtual server.  Switching to the fully operational and available virtual server does not require any more administrator action than selecting a point in time backup and telling it to power on.

Download the whitepaper to learn more about the StoreGrid BMR Plug-in. We suggest that you only install pre-release beta software on computers suitable for testing.

More on what’s new in the StoreGrid 4.2 Beta release notes.

Download the StoreGrid 4.2 beta now!

We look forward to your feedback.

The above post was written by Srivatsan Venkatesan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Pro Online Backup Service allows Value Added Resellers and Managed Service Providers to offer online backup service to their customers without worrying about storage or hardware infrastructure.

The biggest contributor to all this data is video accounting for 50% of all internet by 2012 and the plethora of internet enabled devices such as smartphone, tablets, TV, Blu-ray players etc.

Though this huge amount of data and so called “shadow” data will be foreseen as a problem, we prefer to see it as an opportunity. Zukmo is already addressing ways to tackle your Zettabytes front & center and it is being equipped to handle all that information overload to be experienced in File sharing, Web content, Emails, Documents, Twitter, RSS feeds and Embedded Videos.

You can access the complete post in the link below

http://blogs.cisco.com/news/the-dawn-of-the-zettabyte-era-infographic/

Though we didn’t get a chance to fully demo Zukmo this time around, we did have the opportunity to explore lots of great products and discover some of the features that software users everywhere have come to value and embrace over the years. Now, it’s no surprise that cloud apps and solutions are a hot topic, but despite there having been more than 10 titles under which a company could categorize itself, it was striking to see that close to 50% of the companies in attendance identified their products as hosted SaaS or consumer Web solutions. Furthermore, many of them were deeply entrenched in the Web 2.0 space with crowdsourcing and social functions as their core value propositions.

Of the three award winners at the event (congratulations to all!), two of them (LawPivot and Doot) were crowdsourcing and social solutions, while the last (NetPlenish) was a data-driven app (but even that was something of a value-adding data aggregation site).

The value that comes from crowdsourced information is virtually indisputable. It’s the same reason that many organizations ascribe so much value to diversity. Nobody is the best at everything, so when a large group of diverse and intelligent people attack a problem from different angles, the best solution is far more likely to emerge from the collective pool of knowledge than if the problem was solved by a single person.

Additionally, on the purely social front (though we won’t even attempt to break down why we as humans are naturally social creatures), the fact is that we ascribe extra value to social experiences. A quick visualization of this would be to compare the thought of going to Disney World alone to that of going with five of your closest friends. Shared experiences mean a lot more to us than we might initially think, and in the last few years a lot of software developers have begun to recognize that.

Though we do still spend a considerable amount of time glued to our screens in an effort to bring you the best, those of us working on Zukmo love a social experience as much as you do. That’s why as we continue to flesh out Zukmo in it’s alpha phase we’ve started to focus on how we can make it more social. From enabling discussions around the content in your library to improving your content sharing capabilities, we’re determined ton bring you the best experience possible. If you have any ideas or suggestions for how we can make Zukmo more useful to you, tell us!

Kieran Kay is a Product Marketing Consultant for Vembu Technologies’s Zukmo product.

Zukmo is a cloud-based information and content management solution designed for the frequent information consumer. Zukmo indexes user-uploaded files, Web bookmarks, and streamed content, enabling easy organization, searching, and sharing via an integrated suite of tools. Start your free Zukmo account today!

Twenty years ago this process of gathering information and staying up to date could almost be considered a trivial task. Information flowed at a snail’s pace and there weren’t even that many channels to monitor. We could read the daily paper or a book, or talk to a friend, or watch the news, or listen to the radio… In any case staying up to date consisted of a few relatively simple tasks.

Fast forward to today and we quickly realize that advances in technology have allowed for the creation of countless new information feeds. More importantly, they have accelerated the flow of information delivery to real-time. Under most circumstances these would be considered wonderful advances but without currently adequate information management systems the value of the advances we have made in information delivery is greatly marginalized. We are simply overloaded with information.

I personally monitor more dynamic feeds than is probably productive. From Facebook, to Twitter, Reddit, CNN, TechCrunch, multiple Blogs, email threads and beyond, the sheer volume of information I encounter on even a minute-to-minute basis can sometimes be overwhelming. I do use a few tools (feed aggregators) to help me get by, but I’m still presented with the challenge of assessing what I should actually read in the moment. Sure, I can skim summaries of everything, but a great depth of knowledge in a single subject is infinitely more valuable today than a shallow knowledge of everything. A careful balance must then be struck.

A second issue presents itself in that while all this information is stored on a back-end server somewhere, if I want to buy that cool dog toy I read about last month, where should I even start looking in all of my feeds to find out where I saw it? How do I even conduct a search on half of these feeds anyway? A Google search of the entire public internet is only so effective, especially when the words “dog toy” pull up 18,800,000 results.

Before information sources and feeds take another leap forward in volume and speed of delivery, advances have to be made that can help us organize, recall, and ultimately derive more value from what we already receive. Zukmo is taking that challenge head-on, but that’s something for another post.

Kieran Kay is a Product Marketing Consultant for Vembu Technologies’s Zukmo product.

Zukmo is a cloud-based information and content management solution designed for the frequent information consumer. Zukmo indexes user-uploaded files, Web bookmarks, and streamed content, enabling easy organization, searching, and sharing via an integrated suite of tools. Start your free Zukmo account today!

Zukmo’s story really began with our CEO, Sekar Vembu. As a co-founder and business unit head for the now wildly successful Zoho Corporation (formerly known as AdventNet), Sekar’s experience and reputation for excellence truly preceded him when he finally left to found Vembu Technologies in 2004, a now highly acclaimed, award winning backup and cloud storage provider, and also our parent company.

As the leader of a thriving organization in a very competitive industry Sekar did (and still does) a lot of online research to stay ahead of the competition and market. Over the course of the first four years managing Vembu, this pool of information (which he used to make critical business decisions) became increasingly scattered and unmanageable. As a result, he quickly set out to find a solution. With no information management tools comprehensive enough to keep track of his research, notes, subscriptions, accounts, customers, and everything else he knew that he couldn’t be alone in the need for something better, and so the idea to create the Zukmo solution was born.

Now, we frequently receive numerous questions about how we received our name and we’ll start by saying that much thought went into it. So much so, in fact, that for several months during the early development phase Zukmo was just known as the “information overload product”. It wasn’t until our former director, Kumar Krishnasami, stumbled upon the novel Lojban word Zukmo’i, which means “to remember doing something”, that he finally committed to a name. The roadmap and goals at the time outlined a tool that could organize and remember everything so that you wouldn’t have to. Our CEO Sekar then aptly coined the slogan “Remember Nothing, Zukmo Everything!” Needless to say, the current roadmap has changed considerably and is continuously evolving as we learn more about what we can do to simplify the process of information management for our users.

Since last year, under the newly appointed directorship of Sai Venkat, Zukmo has reached milestones that have broadened the scope and horizon of Zukmo to our valued customers. We’re happily neck-deep in plans for added features and product integrations and we’d love to hear your suggestions for further improving the Zukmo suite of tools. Of course, we can’t think of everything, and Zukmo really is built for you! If you have any feedback or recommendations we’d love to hear them, so feel free to email us at feedback@zukmo.com! We look forward to hearing from you!

Kieran Kay is a Marketing and Business Development Associate for Vembu Technologies’s Zukmo product.

Zukmo is a cloud-based information and content management solution designed for the frequent information consumer. Zukmo indexes user-uploaded files, Web bookmarks, and streamed content, enabling easy organization, searching, and sharing via an integrated suite of tools. Start your free Zukmo account today!

Starting at Zukmo last month was actually a bit of a culture shock for me. We’re a pretty early phase company and I was making the shift from the structured, pampered, everything-within-arm’s-reach corporate environment, to working in a globally distributed start-up. This meant doing anything and everything needed to get the job done, and required a personal stake in the search and development of resources to handle my workflow, communications, projects and deadlines. Probably the largest part of my job as a marketing student/analyst/associate/strategist (hey, I said we’re a start-up!) was and still is research, and without a formal content management solution, that endeavor started out less ideally than I would have liked it to, putting things lightly.

With hardly a week’s passing, a plethora of spreadsheets, Word documents, Web pages, and emails littered both my computer’s desktop and my desk’s top (ha!). It’s a natural part of hitting the ground running: adapting to a new set of demands and a new organizational structure. Still, the speed at which this is done matters, and not adapting quickly enough could mean serious efficiency issues down the road. It probably didn’t help, that the level of commitment and talent within the Zukmo team is nothing short of extraordinary, and the pace at which most people work here sometimes still leaves me short of breath. Needless to say, I was already experiencing the growing strain of my resources not being up to par and thus had to quickly decide on systems to manage each aspect of my work. For handling my research, I chose Zukmo.

Now, it’s fair to accuse me of being biased; I do work here, after all. But I didn’t choose Zukmo because I had someone breathing down my neck. On the contrary, my direct supervisor is 7,500 miles away. I chose Zukmo because internal discussions convinced me that it was slated to be one of, if not the most powerful and versatile information management tool around. When I first created my library not even the notes function was fully implemented. In fact, most of the features we now tout weren’t implemented at the time. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come in such a short time, but even back then there was still one feature that worked like a charm: Bookmarking. This actually served as the ideal tool to start building my research database, seeing as most of my research (and, thus, most of my problems) came from the Web.

When starting to use Zukmo to help me fill the gargantuan shoes I was handed, virtually everything was new to me. I decided that my first step should be to familiarize myself with Zukmo as a product, so I downloaded the Firefox toolbar and bookmarked every Webpage that seemed like it might help me wrap my head around marketing.

From SEO ideas and analytics, to blogs and related products like Historious, Delicious, and Readitlater, I found that, even using Zukmo as a place to store my growing content, it was rapidly becoming unmanageable. I found that each content piece had quite a defined use, from SEO to Blogging tips, interesting notes, and the like. Using Zukmo’s tagging feature enabled me to further segment my library for easy content retrieval, allowing me to derive even greater utility from what started out as a single mass of information.

I could even share important content with my coworkers right from Zukmo, which continues to  help me in disseminating interesting research.

I’m confident that no matter how large my library gets, with Zukmo I’ll easily find what I’m looking for.

Zukmo continues to serve me well as a research library, but one important new feature even enhances my own effectiveness as a marketer with little if any upkeep. Zukmo’s RSS feed handler acts as my own personal research assistant. Once I’ve vetted that an RSS feed is relevant to me and choose to track it in Zukmo, all of the feed’s post history and future updates are automatically imported into my library, indexed, and become a part of my search queries. The RSS feed handler makes staying up to date, and more importantly, being more effective in my job, much easier.

Zukmo’s power and versatility as an information management tool has worked wonders for my effectiveness as a marketer by enabling me to organize and access all of my content in one place; it even keeps me up to date with the subjects and information that I find important. Whether you, too, are looking for something to make you more effective in the roles you play at work, school or home, or are merely looking for something to improve the organization and accessibility of all of your content, you may be surprised by what Zukmo can help you accomplish!

Kieran Kay is a Marketing and Business Development Associate for Vembu Technologies’s Zukmo product.

Zukmo is a cloud-based information and content management solution designed for the frequent information consumer. Zukmo indexes user-uploaded files, Web bookmarks, and streamed content, enabling easy organization, searching, and sharing via an integrated suite of tools. Start a free Zukmo account today!

We request that if you currently use your Yahoo! username and password to sync your Delicious bookmarks with your Zukmo library, that you instead use your Delicious-provided username and password. This can be done via the following:

1) Log in to your Zukmo account

2) Hover your mouse over your username displayed at the top of the screen. In the drop-down menu that appears, click on the “My Account” link

3) On the page that appears, click on the “Sync with Delicious” tab on the left-most vertical menu

4) At the bottom of the screen, enter your Delicious username and password and click on the “Validate Account” link.

Completing the above steps will ensure that access to your Delicious bookmarks in Zukmo will be uninterrupted should support for Yahoo! accounts be discontinued. If you experience any issues syncing your Delicious account with Zukmo please contact us at help@zukmo.com.

Kieran Kay is a Marketing and Business Development Associate for Vembu Technologies’s Zukmo product.

Zukmo is a cloud-based information and content management solution designed for the frequent information consumer. Zukmo indexes user-uploaded files, Web bookmarks, and streamed content, enabling easy organization, searching, and sharing via an integrated suite of tools. Start a free Zukmo account today!

Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Apple Safari go through a rigorous review process to ensure that each update we submit is clean, free of issues, and offers a streamlined, integrated experience with their browser. This, of course, takes time on their end, and until they complete the process and post our update to their site (also automatically notifying you/updating your browser button), our users can sometimes be left without the features that we’ve promised.

We’d like to let you know that any updates to our browser buttons are available immediately after each release. If you’re having trouble accessing any of Zukmo’s functions you can update your browser button from our direct download page

If a direct update doesn’t solve the issue in question please contact us directly at help@zukmo.com. Alternatively, if you have any suggestions about how we can make Zukmo more useful for you, shoot us an email at feedback at feedback@zukmo.com. We’d love to speak to you about them!

Kieran Kay is a Marketing and Business Development Associate for Vembu Technologies’s Zukmo product.

Zukmo is a cloud-based information and content management solution designed for the frequent information consumer. Zukmo indexes user-uploaded files, Web bookmarks, and streamed content, enabling easy organization, searching, and sharing via an integrated suite of tools. Start a free Zukmo account today!