Vembu is attending two important industry events in February:

Parallels Summit
Orlando, FL
February 14-16

Booth #425

The Parallels Summit, being held at the Gaylord Palms Resort in Orlando Florida, will provide a gathering place for the who’s who of the hosting industry.  If you are at the show, be sure to come by our booth because we are announcing  a major product for the hosting industry at this show.  We are focusing on data protection for Managed Hosting Providers in order to what we see as weaknesses in current solutions.  Managed hosting providers have a unique challenge in that they need to protect large farms of physical servers that house a much greater percentage of virtual environments.  They need high-speed data protection solutions that don’t impact the performance of the environment.  In addition, they need flexibility to perform cloud migration when necessary due to a variety of factors including geographic requirements, outages, economic factors, etc.

CloudConnect
Santa Clara, CA
February 13-16
Booth #914

The Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California is hosting  CloudConnect. This event has become the place for all the latest information about cloud computing.  Vembu is also making a major product announcement at this show.  Today,  SMBs are looking for solutions that allow them to share content and collaborate and also fully protect all their applications and systems.  Managed Service Providers need to stop by our booth and see how how they tap into this opportunity without becoming data protection experts and with minimal investment.

Vembu will have product experts at both of these events providing live demonstrations and to answer all your questions about how to build a thriving high margin cloud services business focused on data protection and cloud management.  Please drop us a line and let us know you are attending one of these events so we can make a special effort to connect with you and talk about your cloud services business.

We now have diverse options suiting the different market segments – Zukmo for Consumers and SyncBlaze for MSPs/VARs and we are in the process of bundling the SyncBlaze service as an on premise edition for channel partners interested in hosting the services within the bounds of their infrastructure and storage domains.

FREE TRIAL 

We have introduced a free trial period of 30 days for our service providers which enables them to go for a test drive and get a hands-on feel of this service. For trying out our service, MSPs just need to fill up the minimal information requested in the SyncBlaze channel Signup page. The SyncBlaze support team will then connect with the respective Resellers and guide them in registering their accounts. Our company home page will also be redesigned in the near future to reference all our cloud solution offerings and it will provide for a way to redirect interested parties to the registration page.

We will soon be sharing the details on Pricing in our website.

KEY FEATURES

A number of core features in Sync Blaze are based on the functional adoption of its predecessor and popular customer oriented offering, Zukmo, which has been packaged and branded for business suitability.

The main features for the business edition are as follows:

• Enables your customers to securely store all types of business content with version control.
• Facilitates simplified file sharing with employees/clients etc. without the need for Emails/FTP/ Shared File servers to exchange business critical documents.
• Provides Universal Access from any Workstation, iPhone, Android, iPad etc. through the mobile web platform, desktop utilities and browser extensions.
• User friendly Collaboration for multidisciplinary teams to view/edit files instantly
• Offers a centralized searchable repository for all end user content – Files, Web content, Notes, Google Apps Docs, Emails & Social media
• Collect and Organize tagged Google Apps Docs, Emails, Notes, RSS feeds, Bookmarks, Social & Embedded media
• Reseller and Customer Administration module for control and configuration
• Powered by Amazon AWS – HIPAA, SOX & PCI Compliant infrastructure.

For starters, we have a Features page with a snapshot of the capabilities and also a more detailed Learn More section that covers each of the features in greater depth. We will also be featuring a series of blog posts covering the important functionalities in more depth with relevant information, illustrations and videos in some cases. Also, watch our blog space for more product updates.

During the past couple of months, we have been connecting and conversing with some of the partners who had expressed interest in providing SyncBlaze as a value added service to their customers. We hope to be aggressively marketing and communicating with many more partners & resellers to increase the brand awareness and also to strongly leverage their suggestions, requests and feedback to further refine our product development roadmap.

Check out this graphic based on a study by BASEX on a typical day of a knowledge worker.

The key culprit for this unproductive waste is the Information overload manifest in many shades. Google search confounds us with a gazillion results, Tweets multiply around us like weeds on steroids, Facebook provides a wailing wall of endless updates, Emails make us bite more than what we can chew and mobile devices rings in all these miseries together wherever we go.

So what the heck do we do about it ?

PLAN A: Just fly past the cuckoo’s nest of digital noise and perch on the bandwagon of the Slow Internet movement.

PLAN B: Embrace it through the extensions built and made available to the human mind a.k.a tools that will help you mine, filter, organize, sync and archive your most noteworthy discoveries in the internet wastelands.

well, we here at Zukmo offer you PLAN B ! Try us out for a free ride and see if it will help you. We will aggregate your content from as many sources that are important to you. That includes Desktop files, Google Docs, Notes, Bookmarks, RSS feeds, Embedded Multimedia, Twitter. You can easily share the collected content with your friends and colleagues. You can invite discussions with any group of people on bookmarked page or a specific note or a work related document.

Zukmo simplifies your knowledge gathering and makes it available to you wherever you go and on whatever device you choose to use.

Remember Nothing ! Zukmo Everything !

Well, its the season for predictions and we are on time rolling out our Trend spotting dice for the new year 2012. I saw this list from IBM which predicts trends out for next 5 years !

With big blue on their side, who are we to dispute that call ? A lot more has been said from various quarters for sure by now, but we simply had to throw our hat in the ring and add our 5 cents on the tech sector. So, here are our top five spinners for 2012.

1. Our Business Edition scores with SMB- The much whispered and soon to be baptized Business edition of Zukmo will blaze a trail in the SMB space. In fact, we envision our journey in 2012 to be toeing the lines of a similarly attempted voyage of an ‘Enterprise’ by borrowing from their famous observations.

“Cloud, the final frontier. These are the new deployments of our service Zukmo. Her one-year mission: to explore all SMB markets, seek out new segments, tap old channels and to boldly go where no Dropbox or Box has ever gone before.”

2. Hybrid clouds gather – Hybrid cloud pours cold water on the currently hot debate on whether on premise gets beat up by cloud or vice versa. MSPs dont fret the headlines this year. In 2012, after all the pros and the cons have evened out, everyone (on premise, public cloud, private cloud) and their grandmother will live happily ever after under one hybrid roof. The agility and scalability of cloud computing will not be outdone by the concerns over security, compliance, interoperability and vendor lock-in. Hence the hybrid settlements.

3. Desktop is dressed to kill: Desktop catwalks the ramp as a Size Zero model out-fashioning the thin client hipsters and will be the rage on stage for the first part of the year. we mean those derivatives of HP t5335z and t5565z will start looking up. But then sales will go anorexic once the hype cycle turns down and users begin to understand it still needs firmware upgrades to experience the future enhancements.

4. Big Data gets busted for nothing: Big Data, that untamed bully and cynosure of all eyes will certainly succumb to the elephantine crush of rising methodologies. However, results of successfully processing all that big data will deliver only reality checks and leave you wondering if you were Haduped ! The new question arises “Is humongous amount of data worth at all for harvesting precious insights or does it simply cloud the picture ?“ or rather the old question resurfaces “ will Eureka moments still be experienced in bathtubs ?”

5. A nursery rhyme is born. Doc now says “A million tablets a day will keep all the desktops sales away”

In case, none of this works out, we wont be a tad bothered.Since the goal has been always to

Remember Nothing ! Zukmo Everything !

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.

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.

Want to know what else is overloading our brains and eyeballs these days ? It’s those dime a dozen apps that keep raining down and drenching our smartphones, tablets, desktops and the web. We hear that there may be a million mobile apps around across all platforms, half of which are in iPhone and iPad alone.

This overcrowding has the noxious effect of numbing prospective users from digging out the right solution to their problems and ignoring all the new and exciting apps that are crying out to be spotted. A crude search in app marketplaces would leave you dazed and confused with too many options and list only the ones which were marketing finessed and reviewed by paid trolls on top. There is really no premium & neutral forum that categorizes and rates all known and upcoming mobile, desktop and web apps.

We got bogged down by this thinking when we saw this from Evernote – Mobile apps called Hello and Food, which is good for people who would like to remember faces they met and meals they ate. Not sure if they are targeting Amnesia patients.

Here is one take on who may love it

One of those times when enough is enough !

Remember Nothing ! Zukmo Everything !

Mobile Website

We have unveiled a new version of Zukmo Mobile Web designed for our smartphone customers. Now you can use Zukmo from any web enabled mobile device without installing any custom software.

Just point your mobile browser to http://m.zukmo.com and you can browse and search through your all your content. The following are the capabilities of the mobile website.

• Authenticate with your Google or Yahoo or Facebook or Zukmo profiles.
• Access a listing of your Bookmarks, Notes, Tweets, Google docs and Files.
• Easily search and filter your Bookmarks, Notes, Tweets and Google docs.
• View, Delete & Download any file synced to your account.
• Use Reader to access and view uncluttered content of Bookmarks and Notes.

Our mobile platform currently comprises of the Android app and the mobile website. This is just the beginning of our mobile roadmap and we do plan on releasing native clients for other popular mobile platforms and devices (such as iPhone).

File Sync

We have added the ability to perform set of actions on the files listed. There will be a right-click menu listing for each file entry that provides the user with the ability to Download, Delete, Show Version, Share and Rename files.

The users will be able to view a listing of all prior versions of the file since there is a snapshot for each version that is saved.

The users will be able to share the synced files with others within or outside of Zukmo. This ensures that an URL link will be sent to any email contact with one's comments.

Notes

We have redesigned the UI in order to make it user friendly and easier for accessing and sharing the notes as well as the listing all in one place. We have done away with the earlier design in our Notes service that requires the user to click on the notes link and display a dialog box with the notes editor. Instead we have opted to elegantly display the notes editor inline along with the entire catalog of notes in a remodeled three column layout within the landing page.

Collaborative Workspace

We have also merged the features of sharing and discussion to combine the synergies of both user actions. Henceforth, there will be a link for each content item (bookmarks, notes etc) "Share & Discuss" that can be used both to share with contacts through email as well as kick start discussing on that topic with those contacts.

Users can always get to the specific discussions by clicking on the comments link.

The discussions section under "My Space" has also been revamped and when the user clicks on a discussion, the specific thread of discussion appears in bulletin board format

Miscellaneous

• There is a re-fetch link for each bookmark that will obtain the latest snapshot of content from the respective sites.
• Synced files can be sorted by filename, size and modified date.
• Tweets are listed sort in descending order by the date tweeted.
• Landing page has been simplified by removing the tabs present in the earlier version.
• Bug Fixes ! Thanks to our users who doubled up as our beta testers.

While the ground is being busily and broadly prepared for an important business edition launch before the end of the year, we wanted to continue hitting on the goal dartboard with a few pointy enhancements and thus keep the bull’s eye of our user’s expectations in focus at all times! Stay Tuned.

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!

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/

Alas, things have prompted a relook on our choice since then. Not the message but just the particular example.

We happened to stumble upon an absolutely BRILLIANT, enlightening curve ball of a post by an ex-Apple UI wiz Bret Victor. He too complained about trend extrapolation and then caricatured Microsoft Vision 2019 as an increment of the status quo! Talk about being on the same page and still reading different tea leaves.

But once we finished reading his compelling article, the volte-face ensued. You can check out this groovy post by clicking on his image link below.

As always, Remember Nothing ! Zukmo Everything !