With the StoreGrid’s recent  granular integration with cPanel for domain backup and WHMCS for billing and provisioning automation, we headed straight to HostingCon 2011, San Diego to get feedback on these integrations from the hosting community. What we got was more than feedback; we received insight into how the industry is shifting. We personally spoke with more than 150 attendees who mostly comprised of hosting providers, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and VARs. Many of the hosting providers who are currently offering pure hosting services that includes dedicated hosting, managed hosting, shared hosting, web hosting and VPN said they are looking at offering managed services including fully outsourced network management arrangements. During the show one MSP even asked “Hey! Do you see some convergence in the industry between hosting providers and MSPs?” Yes, many of the hosting providers whom we spoke with said they are planning to include managed services as a part of their short term business strategy. Of course there are hosting providers, who already have managed service offerings, but I am talking about pure play hosting providers stretching their business towards managed services and are optimistic about the lucrative opportunity.

So, what does this mean for Vembu? Hosting providers jumping in the managed services market have two major requirements. One is to backup the domains through their hosted control panel and the other is to offer a fully managed backup service for not just the data hosted in their data canter, but also for customers’ on premise data.

Below are some of the recent additions and enhancements in StoreGrid which makes it a compelling solution for both hosting providers and MSPs.

1. Granular integration with cPanel with the ability to perform restore from cPanel client console
2. Billing and provisioning integration with WHMCS
3. Comprehensive reseller management
4. Support  for Disk Imaging, Bare Metal Restore and P2V (physical to virtual) on all windows machines
5. Ability to backup Virtual Machines (VMware and Hyper-V)
6. Integration with PSA and RMM platforms like ConnectWise and Autotask
7. and lot’s more….

We still have a long way to go to satisfy all the needs of both hosting and managed services industry and our team here at Vembu is hard at work to ensure we meet your needs. Soon you will hear about additional integrations and strategic partnerships that will benefit our partners including integration with Parallels Plesk, Level Platforms, Ubersmith etc…With our ever growing partner base it is important for us to understand even a small change in the industry and at any point in time we want our partners to stay ahead of competition. Please let us know your thoughts and needs.

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.

For starters, Wolfram Alpha is NOT a search engine – its (what they call) a “computational knowledge engine” – it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.

Slight detour to StoreGrid…

StoreGrid has a feature called “Local to Remote Migration” (LtoR) wherein you can ‘seed’ a backup server with the 1st full backup and can therefore start with doing only incremental backups from day 1 itself. You’d typically take advantage of this feature for ‘first full backups’ that you think would take a long time.

How much time will the first backup take? Ask Wolfram Alpha…

For example, if you had 10GB and wanted to know how long it would take over a 1Mbps line (For asymmetric broadband plans, remember that you should need to look for the upload speed – NOT download), simply enter “data transfer time 10GB, 1Mb/s” – try it out using the box above.

See the answer, and if you don’t have the time, go the LtoR way! Go ahead, give it a spin.

Click here for more examples of “Web & Computer” stuff you can use Wolfram Alpha for. A larger list of possibilities is here – and includes things like knowing how many calories you had for breakfast and getting information about satellites.

What’s more, it even knows the meaning of life!

Have fun!

The above post was written by Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan 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.