Jason Steuernagel, Got It Back LLC

The Challenges

The advent of virtualization and cloud technologies has changed the Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) picture dramatically in the SMB space. Managed Service Providers offering backup services face a greater challenge to provide Backup & Disaster Recovery Solution which is not only automated completely but also reliable and flexible to the ever growing demands of their business customers.

The Solution

Due to increase in virtualization and cloud technologies adoption, Service Providers need to identify a Backup & Disaster Recovery solution which offers high-performance backup with multiple restore options to cater to different categories of customers. They also have the onerous task to lookout for a product which constantly improves  to meet the  emerging data protection and disaster recovery needs of  evolving  businesses.

The StoreGrid Benefit

Vembu StoreGrid offers a compelling recipe for addressing the technical and economic barriers to broaden Cloud Backup and Virtualization based disaster recovery adoption in SMB. In particular StoreGrid attracted SMBs as it allowed them to perform virtualized disaster recovery shrinking the CAPEX required with traditional DR.

See a real MSP talk about  all this and more of his experiences of solving the challenges with StoreGrid in this video case study.

At Vembu, we not only believe in offering a profitable partner channel program but also constantly listen to valuable inputs from our partners to continuously improve the product.

Feel free to take a closer look at our latest edition StoreGrid 4.2 to learn more.

Vembu was one of the sponsors of the Parallels Summit this week at the Gaylord Palms Resort in Orlando, FL. The keynote presentation was delivered by industry veteran Guy Kawasaki who talked about how to build a great company by “enchanting” your customers. You can read the VAR Guy’s Blog about Kawasaki’s presentation if you click here. Kawasaki explained why enchanting your customers is the key for service providers (or any business for that matter) to build a successful and thriving business. According to Kawasaki, the three pillars of enchantment are likability, trustworthiness and quality.

As I listened to Kawasaki speak and thought about Vembu’s business, I was proud to reflect on the fact that those core values embody the culture of Vembu and have much to do with our continued success as a company. First let’s examine likability. The Vembu team works closely with our customers and we always strive to present a positive attitude through all interactions and communications. We truly love helping partners build successful data protection services businesses and we hope it shows as we help you become familiar with the technology and as you deploy it to your customers. Our support team takes great pride in ensuring that we have a “duchenne” smile on our faces as we help you solve issues and answer your questions. We understand that not everyone has the same relentless passion about data protection and content management that we do, so we want to help you build your business every step of the way.

Kawasaki’s next pillar of enchantment is trustworthiness. Guy highlighted some of the companies that have achieved a high level of trustworthiness such as Amazon, Zappos and Nordstrom. He talked about how in order to be trusted, you first have to trust. Data protection is arguably the technology area with the highest need for a trusted relationship with your technology partner. Vembu has developed valuable trusted relationship with its partners because we understand that you are placing your trust in us to develop a technology platform capable of protecting and rapidly restoring your customers’ data. Our focus is ensuring that when responding to a disaster, we have to support your ability to restore your customer’s data. We also build trust through our efforts to help you become familiar with our products. We freely provide trial licenses because we trust that if you get a chance to experience our technology first hand you will understand how you can build a thriving data protection business. We strive to make that process as painless as possible.

Finally, Kawasaki talked about the importance of quality. He highlighted his experiences at Apple and Steve Jobs’ obsession with quality in Apple products. As I think about Vembu’s commitment to quality, I think about our commitment to our channel and the fact that our roadmap has always been driven by our customers. Our ability to deliver quality product has been largely due to our incredible partner community and your willingness to collaborate with us to determine what we need to do to make you successful. Whether it is tweaks to our user interface to make the product easier to use or integration with tools that you use every day to make your use of the product more seamless, Vembu strives to build quality into everything we do. Our vibrant customer advisory council provides an ongoing mechanism for our key partners to communicate with our engineering and product teams to highlight what’s working well, where we can improve and what our partners think our priorities should be going forward.

Vembu launched StoreGrid Hosting Provider Edition this week at the Parallels Summit in response to hundreds of requests from our partners who have been using StoreGrid for years to protect their hosting environments. This edition of StoreGrid, specifically designed for hosting environments, has deep integration with the tools that hosting providers use every day such as Parallels Plesk and cPanel. In addition to integration with the most popular hosting platforms, Vembu’s rich support for virtualized environments makes it easy for you to do things like back up a physical server and then restore individual domains when the need arises. In addition, you can perform bare metal restores of entire servers to deliver the most rapid recovery when needed. Vembu’s architecture provides a high performance backup with minimal impact on your server infrastructure. In addition to making it easier for hosting providers to protect their own server infrastructure, Vembu is also focused on making it easier for MHPs to sell a data protection service by integrating with the Parallels application store. This allows you to sell data protection services as a cloud-based application from within your Parallels store.

This was Vembu’s first time sponsoring the Parallels Summit and we had a great time meeting existing partners and also new prospective partners. We were excited to show off our new StoreGrid Hosting Provider Edition product and appreciated the warm reception it received from all of you. These kinds of events allow us to find out what the hosting businesses need from a company focused on data protection and content management and we relish the opportunity to interact with all of you face to face. We look forward to many more such opportunities throughout 2012.

Here is our freshly setup booth before the show opened:

Anticipation was for the expo was high as you can see from this shot of the growing crowd before the show opened:

If you haven’t already checked out SyncBlaze, now is a good time to see how SyncBlaze can form the basis of a content management service. I think you will be surprised to learn how many of your current customers are already looking for a solution to manage their ever growing content. SyncBlaze is the perfect fit for your SMB customers. Learn more about SyncBlaze at: http://syncblazecloud.vembu.com/index.html

StoreGrid Key features:

1. Disk Backup with effortless bare-metal recovery for all Windows Desktop and Server platforms
2. Virtualization support for P2V, V2V migration to restore physical machine backups as VM in your virtual environments.
3. Support major Server Virtualization platforms like MS Hyper-V, VMware ESX, Citrix Zen and KVM
4. Offers granular integration with cPanel and WHMCS where you can offer domain backup and recovery service to your customers
5. Integrates with PSA platforms like AutoTask and ConnectWise
6. Complete recovery flexibility, choose your recovery time – from multiple recovery points to restore applications (like cPanel or MySQL) instantly to a specific point in time
7. StoreGrid application smart plugins ensure availability of business critical applications such as MySQL, cPanel, SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle.

and lots more…

If you have any questions on the above feature set of the product, please feel free to contact us at storegrid-hosting AT vembu DOT com.

We also have now opened up a new office here in Sunnyvale, CA and if you are prospect or a partner and would like to schedule a in-person meetup to discuss the product’s capabilities, please contact us at 1-408-981-3920

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan 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.

Addition of CloudNucleus strengthens our current Vembu offerings in the areas of Failover virtualization, P2V (Physical to Virtual Migration), P2P (Dis-similar hardware migration), Disk Imaging and Bare Metal Restore. Our partners have always been asking us for improvised support for offering enterprise class Disaster Recovery services and by this acquisition we proved our commitment to the channel one more time. Here’s what our CEO, Sekar Vembu said regarding this acquisition, “This combination is all about accelerating our ability to bring key functionality to our MSP and MHP partners. We’re combining best-of-breed storage technologies, two winning employee populations with similar reputations for customer focus, and two experienced management teams with highly complementary visions for the future of information management. This represents a significant win for the companies, our collective customers, employees and partners”

We intend to integrate the CloudNucleus technology offering into StoreGrid and deliver a unified Data Protection and Disaster Recovery software. We expect to have the first release of the integrated solution available during the end of October 2011.

“CloudNucleus’ employees, customers, and partners will see tremendous benefits from Vembu’s extensive partner community, expertise in data protection solutions for the MSP market, global presence and overall financial strength,” said Srivatsan Venkatesan, CloudNucleus’ founder and CEO.  We will now have additional resources to further accelerate the development of solutions that fulfill our mission of delivering technology that enables our partners to deliver truly differentiated services to their customers.” added Venkatesan

Srivatsan Venkatesan will be joining the Vembu team as VP – Product Management and drive the Vembu’s product development initiatives and enhance StoreGrid’s support in the areas of Virtualization backup, Continuous Data Protection and instant failover virtualization during disaster recovery.

“This would add a great tool to our company’s present Backup and Disaster Recovery Offerings” said Ed Monacelli, president of EMCS, “We are upgrading all our clients over to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans and are confident to see an increased revenue from this integrated solution of Vembu and CloudNucleus”

We are confident that this acquisition will add more value to our existing channel partner base of both Vembu and CloudNucleus and enhance our core competencies to go after new set of customers. In case you have any questions regarding this acquisition, please feel free to mail us at storegrid-partner AT vembu DOT com

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan 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.

Choose Partners Who Listen—Find partners who evolve their features and define their roadmap based on the specific requirements of their customers.  These partners will have regular communication with their customers through a variety of interactions.  First, the partner’s support organization should have a formal feedback mechanism into product management and engineering to ensure that the customer’s voice is being heard.  This goes far beyond fixing bugs and includes usability and functional evolution of the product.  Second, look for partners who have formulated formal customer advisory boards and proactively reach out to their active customers to gather feedback on existing usability and functionality as well as input on the priorities of future releases.  Finally, look for partners who have executive-to-executive interaction so they can stay apprised of the macro business issues and other factors affecting your business.

Channel Commitment Means Everything—Many companies like to talk about being channel focused, but the proof is in the pudding.  Avoid working with companies that try to sell direct and through the MSP channel because invariably those companies will find themselves staring down the barrel of channel conflict.  It is important to partner with companies that is transparent while dealing with channel partners.  In addition, the company needs to understand the margin requirements of its channel partners and ensure that the discounting structure is clearly defined and handled in a consistent manner.  Select partners who understand services and the MSP community.  They need to appreciate recurring revenue and SLAs and the way YOU need financial and support arrangements to work.

The good news is that there are vendors who have a great reputation working with the MSP community.  Vembu was founded on a culture of close communication with its partners.  We realize that our MSP partners are living and breathing the customer experience every day and our goal is to support the product and drive the product roadmap based on what our partners need to grow their business.  We established a Customer Advisory Board several months ago and we have had several very successful meetings where 70+ Vembu partners have shared their feedback on usability, new releases and future requirements.

Vembu understands the MSP marketplace and our pricing reflects the goal of consistent discounting with high margins to maximize the revenue for our MSP partners.  We also live and breathe the MSP experience having built up a partner base of over 2500 MSPs.  We know your business depends on your reputation and your ability to provide high quality service to your customers.  Our commitment continues to be providing leading edge technology, great support and a roadmap that will keep you meeting the needs of your MSP customers now and in the future.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan 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.

Some of the features that might be of important to you as a Managed Service Provider are listed below

• Disk Imaging and Bare Metal Restore on all Windows Servers and Workstations
• P2V capability where you can convert a physical machine to either an VMware or Hyper-V file
• Support for backing up virtual machines (VMware and Hyper-V)
• Centralized monitoring and management of clients and backup servers
• Integration with leading PSA and RMM platforms like Connectwise, Autotask etc..
• and lot’s more…

As a Managed Hosting Provider, you might be interested in knowing what’s cooking in here for you

• Granular integration with cPanel and WHMCS
• Ability to backup multiple domains / databases / files / settings hosted through cPanel
• Single click restore of domains either through StoreGrid web console or cPanel console
• Ability for billing and provisioning through WHMCS
• Extensive support for backing up Linux and FreeBSD environments
• and lots more…

For more information, please contact storegrid-partner@vembu.com or call us at 1-432-558-0055

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan 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.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now

• Ed Monacelli
• Matt Dryfhout
• John Hankers
• Altus Koorts
• Dennis Levesque

We once again congratulate the winners and hope they are going to enjoy the Apple iPad v 2.

Others fret not! We’ll sending out more of such surveys in future and you could be the one next time. And yeah, your free license as promised will be credited to your Partner Zone account.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan 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.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now

The folks at Interop sent us a special promo code through which you can get FREE EXPO PASS or 25% off on the conference pass. If you would like to get one, email us at storegrid-partner AT vembu DOT com

BTW, did you know ! Vembu Technologies is also recognized as finalist for Best of Interop 2011. InformationWeek Analytics and Interop Las Vegas 2011 Recognize Vembu Technologies for Market Leading Innovation. The Best of Interop Judging Committee, comprised of InformationWeek Analytics editors and analysts, reviewed over 100 entries and selected finalists based on the products with the most significant technical impact that are helping to move business technology forward.

See you there at the event and let us all share our experiences.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan 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.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now

Synthetic Full Backup for Exchange Server Backup

One of the challenges for Service Providers in delivering Offsite Backups for Exchange Servers, has been running full backups from the customer’s site to their offsite data center on regular basis, say once a month. Without these regular full backups, the number of incremental log files in the backup data would continuously grow, making restore all that much more time consuming. Very large Exchange Server data and limited network bandwidth are the common constrains that service providers have to work within. They normally overcome these by seeding the full backups using external drives through StoreGrid data export/import capabilities or by setting up an on-site StoreGrid backup server which is then replicated (either by Replication Server seeding or directly to replication server) to an offsite StoreGrid replication server.

With the release of StoreGrid v3.5, StoreGrid now supports Synthetic Full Backups where during an additional full backup, only the changed data with respect to the previous full backup alone is sent to the backup server, instead of sending the entire Exchange Server data again. The logs are purged into the Exchange Server during a Synthetic Full Backup just like regular full backups. During the restore, the full backup, the Synthetic Full Backups and  the incremental log files backed up after the last Synthetic Full Backup are retrieved to restore the Exchange Server data.
For more details on Synthetic Full Backup on Exchange Server Backup, please refer this help document.

Synthetic Full Backup for File Backup

Service Providers managing large file backups for their customers sometimes run into scenario where the version files become huge (when files are frequently changed and the incremental backups are run for a long period of time), making the overall incremental backups larger and longer to complete. StoreGrid v3.5 extends Synthetic Full Backup feature to file backups as well, where if the size of a version file exceeds a certain percentage (can be set by user, default is 80%) of the file’s initial full backup, then StoreGrid v3.5 client will automatically run a Synthetic Full Backup of the file during the subsequent incremental backup. During Synthetic Full Backup of a file, only the changed blocks of the file with respect to the previous Full Backup (a Synthetic Full Backup) is backed up. The version files created after the Synthetic Full Backup will be small as it will be with respect to the last Synthetic Full Backup and not the initial full backup.

The details of Synthetic Full Backup for files can be found here.

Mail Level Restore

Often users by mistake delete emails that they later wish they had not. Service Providers trying to restore the deleted emails would prefer to restore minimal backup data and not the entire Exchange Server to retrieve the specific emails. StoreGrid v3.5 SP1 client now provides extensive search and filtering capabilities to enable Service Providers to select and restore specific emails into the Exchange Server from the restored mailbox data. The emails can be searched by From, To addresses, Subject, Date etc.

Like for example,  just the Sent Mails from 8am to 11am on a particular day from John’s mailbox alone could be restored back into the Exchange Server.

For more details on Mail Level Restore, please refer this help document.

Disk Image Backup and Bare Metal Restore with P2V (Beta)

Some of our partners have been running third party applications to take image backup of disk and backup that data using StoreGrid to an offsite backup server.  Such third party applications tend to be expensive and managing multiple solutions is often cumbersome to say the least. Partners have been therefore requesting us to provide Disk image and Bare Metal Restore capabilities natively within StoreGrid and that is exactly what we have done.

We launched a beta version of StoreGrid Disk Imaging and Bare Metal Restore (BMR) and P2V Backups (Physical to Virtual Conversion). It works on all Windows 2003 & above Servers and Windows XP & above desktops. It supports backing up the entire image of a disk or specific partitions. It also supports converting the Windows image into VMDK (VMware) or VHD (Windows Hyper-V) virtual image. In the event of the server disaster, partners can restore the machine on a virtual environment at their data center and provide business continuity for their customers.

More details of BMR and P2V capabilities within StoreGrid can be found in the following help documents:

http://www.storegrid.net/help/31/sp/PageHelp/bmr-backup-configuration.html
http://www.storegrid.net/help/31/sp/PageHelp/bmr-restore-configuration.html
http://www.storegrid.net/help/31/sp/PageHelp/bmr-recovery-through-cd.html

This is just the tip of the iceberg. We have lots more interesting features coming on the way like VMware Backup, Oracle and PostgreSQL Database Backup, support for SNMP, local+remote SQL and Exchange Server backup etc.  If you are a prospective partner who have been frustrated with some legacy backup software, we would encourage you to take advantage of our ‘competitive upgrade offer’ and equip your backup arsenal with latest features available with StoreGrid.

Contact us at storegrid-partner AT vembu DOT com to know more about our competitive upgrade offer.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan 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.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now