Start following us @vembustoregrid as you might be missing some updates already!

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.

If you are in the web hosting industry you probably would have heard ‘cPanel’ very frequently. We had some active developments with the cPanel team and now we have a complete integrated solution with cPanel / WHM for managing domain backup and restore.

So, here we are at the cPanel automation bootcamp to showcase StoreGrid Hosting Provider Edition, designed for Hosting and Cloud Service Providers to deliver full and self-managed backup and recovery services. With extended support for cPanel/WHM integration and effortless bare-metal recoveries with P2V migrations.

We came to Austin yesterday and had a tiring flight from SFO. I woke up early today, got ready for event and took a cab to the Sheraton Hotel to check-in and registrations. Wait a minute! isn’t the event starting only at 3 PM central? yeah!, we realized that after we reached the venue. To our surprise there were people already buzzing on the lobby wearing T-shirts with some technical names on it (just like us). We had some really good conversations with some of the folks attending the bootcamp.

I have my cPanel TV Live session tomorrow Tuesday 11am CST. I plan to walk through StoreGrid Hosting Edition overview and competitive advantage. I’m joined by Srivatsan Venkatesan from Vembu (Vice-President, Product Management).

As we get in to the final stretch of preparation – I’m really hoping to see many of our partners, cPanel users and of course with our competitive brothers and sisters!

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.

There’s a competitor of ours called Axxxx

They have a forum (if you hadn’t guessed already, you know who they are now)

One of the key rules on their forum is ‘no names of competitors’. So you’ll find references to us as Vxxxx. For example (from their forum): My reseller is close to dropping our service and switch to a vxxxx based solution because of these kinds of glitches. Please help.

You’ll also find references to some of the consumer backup services like Mxxx and Cxxxxxxxx (who is sometimes also referred to as Carb – in the fond hope that a reader will dismiss this reference as a discussion on the Atkins Diet)

Frankly, I find the whole thing rather childish and an insult to a Service Provider’s intelligence.

We run a forum too, but we leave it ‘open’ in the true spirit of the word. Sure, we’ve had our fair share of bouquets & brickbats….and positive & negative references to competitors’ products. They all make for a healthy discussion. And quite honestly, if you’re confident about your product, facilitating a free and open discussion is only to your advantage – in the long run!

So why this post, now? We’ve always had a quiet chuckle on Axxxx’s forum policies, but this recent post in response to Axxxx’s huge price rise really lowered the bar (notice the subtle irony)!

In the thread, there is a comment by a ‘thdrought’ wherein he says (grammar and typos are his own):

I am currently evaluating this software bring my clients online backups in-house.  This is my second company I’m evaluating, and so far have no issues with this product. I’d like to get other Ahsay users comments on this product, and for the unhappy ones, maybe some reasons why you don’t like it.

As for other providers, I just warn to steer clear of V-e-m-b-u. I ran a trial of thier product for 1 week. Installation seemed easy enough, though all clients run a version of Apache web server. I thought this was very strange. Why are the backup clients needing to run Apache?

Not a single backup ever completed! Ever. Though the portal would say that they did. Weird… but I would get a failure email, followed by a sucess email and the portal always said “100% complete” on all those backups.

Then, the portal stopped working. Never could log back into it. A sales person from V-e-m-b-u called me, transferred me to technical support, which they “logged a ticket”, but never called me back. That was a week ago.  I promptly uninstalled their portal, clients and made sure that the V-e-m-b-u directories were deleted from all.

If anyone else is looking at something else, please share, but even with the price increase, so far this product is looking better and better for a backup solution in this price range.

Now, that’s insulting. Not to us! We’re still laughing. It’s insulting to a service provider’s intelligence to assume that he won’t see through this hollow attempt by Axxxx to ‘doctor a conversation’. I’ll save the Sherlock Holmes post for a later date, but suffice to say that at least one other person thought the same and even mentioned so in the thread:

thdrought : I highly doubt you are a real person. You sound more like an Ahsay sales person trying to pretend to be a user.

Hungry for more XXX? Here’s  another thread where their tech support replies saying:

May I ask what version of OBM are you currently using? Furthermore, may I ask if the machine in concern has “Shadow Protect” or “Sxxxxxxx Bxxxxx Exxx System Recovery” installed? If so, there is a Volume Shadow Copy conflict between the two software. Our development team has resolve the incompatibility issue. Could you please try patching your OBM to the latest version to see if the problem can be resolved?

(Note: Thanks to Symantec, Sxxxxxxxx is NOT StoreGrid)

Two tips before I sign off:

1) If you’re an Axxxx partner looking for better prospects, please click here. And be sure to ask your sales rep for the ex-Axxxx special.

2) If you’re planning on starting a backup software/service and want free publicity from your competition, call yourself Bxxxxx (yes, the URL is available)

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.

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

We’ve got 5 a sack-load of Google Wave invites to give away – to the first five people who ask for them in the comments below.

Go ahead; add your name below. We’ll accomodate all we can.

PS: invites will be emailed to the email ID associated with your profile.

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.

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

Two days ago,  Amazon announced Amazon Web Services (AWS) calculator on their blog. I can see this becoming quite useful, and am, in fact, surprised that they didn’t do this earlier.

You can access the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator here. The calculator, currently in Beta, allows you to get an idea of the kind of costs you can expect for different services that you might use. They’ve even had a stab at typical figures you might be seeing for some ‘typical use cases’.

Don’t see the use cases? You need to scroll to the right if your resolution is 1024 x 768 (or lower)  – see the screenshot above.

The five use cases they have are (comments in brackets are my own):

• A marketing website (bandwidth intensive; requests from visitors)
• A Web App (would use more of computing resources, including DB)
• A Media application (storage & bandwidth intensive)
• HPC Cluster (CPU intensive)
• Disaster Recovery & Backup (storage intensive and computing to a lesser degree)

Take the numbers with a pinch of salt (an ounce, in the case of DR & Backup). But that’s not the point – I think it is pretty bold of them to hazard a guess knowing fully well that one size won’t fit all…

Rather than take the numbers at face value, you should focus on the AWS services in the ‘mix’, i.e. the different services that AWS assume you will use for each scenario. It serves to give you a good idea of the services you should be looking at.

We’ll take a more detailed look and provide some data that’s more relevant to StoreGrid + AWS deployments. Stay tuned.

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.

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

After over a year of work (on top of the existing StoreGrid engine), Vembu Home is finally ready.

We took all the time we needed as we wanted Vembu Home to be unlike anything you’ve seen. And we (obviously) think, it is unlike any  backup software you’ve seen- and will see for some time, at least.

The obvious question first. Why is Vembu Home different?

a)      It’s iPhone inspired user interface is light years ahead of anything else. With its fluidity and intuitiveness, people may actually start enjoying backing up.

b)      It is the first and only consumer backup solution that supports “free local backup” to disk and optional Amazon Cloud backup

c)       The software is FREE – yes, FREE as in beer. Vembu Home is a zillion times better than whatever software you’re using to backup to your external hard disks. So if you want to junk that (software) and use some seriously potent stuff, go right ahead.

d)      Our OPTIONAL online backup service is built on the Amazon Cloud. We’ve been doing this ‘Amazon stuff’ for over a year now. Amazon has been doing this ‘cloud stuff’ for years. In fact, they started it!

e)      For the technically inclined: Vembu Home is built on Adobe Flex+AIR. It’s the only backup software to leverage this cutting edge platform.

f)       It is built on proven technology. Vembu’s StoreGrid has been around for over 4 years, runs on over 100,000 computers, and is ‘under the hood’ of 1,500 service providers across the globe.

g)      More than backup – there’s a drag & drop box, a web archive, online restores, and the ability to share backed up files by email – from a browser. It’s too much of effort to detail everything here. Get your FREE copy, instead.

Vembu Home is currently in Private Beta and we’re limiting users – for now.

You can use the (limited) invitation code: BACKUPSCANBEFUN

Where does Vembu Home fit into our existing product portfolio & market focus? Please come back tomorrow for a ‘revealing’ blog post on this –same bat time, same bat channel.

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.

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

Besides this affinity for many things ‘Google’, three other events inspired this post:

a) Google announced its quarterly results earlier this month. Though revenues were almost stagnant, Google managed to deliver a higher net income of $ 1.48 bn (Qtr ending June 30, 2009)

b) Techcrunch says Bing users are twice as likely to click on ads than Google users.

c) I clicked on the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button on Google today – more out of curiosity than out of habit! This got me thinking…

Who clicks the ‘I’m feeling Lucky’ button anyway?

So, I googled it up (note the subtle irony here) and came across a very interesting article from Nov 2007 ; here’s an excerpt:

Google cofounder Sergey Brin told public radio’s Marketplace that around one percent of all Google searches go through the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Because the button takes users directly to the top search result, Google doesn’t get to show search ads on one percent of all its searches. That costs the company around $110 million in annual revenue, according to Rapt’s Tom Chavez. So why does Google keep such a costly button around? “It’s possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. I think what’s delightful about ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ is that it reminds you there are real people here,” Google exec Marissa Mayer explained, or at least tried to.

So Google left $110 million on the table two years ago! Let’s try and recalculate the figure now…

a) Google’s annual revenue in 2008 was $22 billion – about twice its revenues in 2006. 66% of Google’s revenues are from Google owned sites. I’m simply assuming that Google.com (and other country sites) account for about 50%, and properties like Gmail and other Google sites account for the balance 16%. In effect, I’m assuming that search from Google homepage(s) contributes to $11bn of the total $22bn revenue.

b) Lets assume that the ‘1% of people click on I’m Feeling Lucky’ still holds. In fact, I suspect that this number would be higher considering the increasing number of newbie net users especially in developing countries! You’d expect the people who click on “I’m Feling Lucky” to be net newbies and unable to really differentiate between organic and paid results. Those well crafted & well placed ads (like ours!) would attract their attention a lot more.

c) If the average Bing user is twice as likely as the average Google user to click on an ad, I’d argue that the average ‘I’m feeling lucky’ clicker, had he clicked on the money making ‘Google Search’ button instead, would be at least thrice as likely to click on an ad. Hence the ‘I’m feeling Lucky’ guys could account for (almost) 3% of ‘opportunity’ revenues

So, let’s do the math…

$11bn in annual revenues x a conservative 3% =

$ 330mn in increased revenues – simply by removing the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button!

What does this do for the bottom-line?

There is no direct cost (of revenue/goods sold) for this ad inventory – unlike the ad inventory from the content network where about 75% of the revenues are paid out to the content network partner. Hence this is $330mn of PURE Gross Profit! Google typically spends 30% of its revenues in R&D & G&A expenses. Assuming this ratio applies for the incremental revenues, and taking that expense figure of 30% out ($100mn) , you’d expect them to add a whopping $230mn annually to their net income – simply by removing the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button!

This $230mn translates to an increase (in net income) of over 5%

I believe this is too tempting an opportunity for Google to pass up! When the going is good, its easy to say stuff like “It’s possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money… “ . In the current economic climate, you can expect Google to milk every opportunity they have. After all, they still ‘answer’ to Wall Street!

Considering all this, the “I’m Feeling Lucky” opportunity is too much of a potential cash cow (or sitting duck, or low hanging fruit – pick your metaphor) to pass by. Remember, it translates into a direct increase of 5% in net income!

Of course, when it happens, Google won’t tell you the real reason! Expect to hear something like…

“…extensive research conducted by Google showed that the absence of the I’m Feeling Lucky button translated to a user taking 6 milliseconds less – to reach the results page he was looking for. As much as the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ is a part of Google history, removing it makes for an enhanced user experience, and finally, Google is all about the user’s experience. So, with a heavy heart…”

As some people say, It’s all about the Money, Honey!

Remember, you saw it here first!

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.

Credit : Wikimedia Commons

Ah, the price of fame!

Tim McGuire of  “The Backup Plan” has been offering his customers ‘Vembu powered’ online backup services since January 2007. His company’s website is http://thebackupplan.com

All’s been well, and Tim has been steadily signing up new customers and backing them up!

However, in recent times, in spite of more business, and a huge traffic surge, a smaller proportion of his website visitors are really keen on his backup services!What happened? Well, Hollywood happened…

I have Google Alerts set up for various terms, and ‘backup’ is obviously one of them. As a consequence, I get snippets on everything from generator backups to data backups. Last month, I noticed a couple of alerts for ‘The Backup Plan’. I clicked on the link expecting to see something about Tim’s firm, but was surprised to see JLo’s smiling face instead! Apparently, “The Backup Plan” is the title of a new movie starring JLo. The movie is scheduled for a 2010 release but the spin doctors are already hard at work, and legions of crazed fans are typing thebackupplan into their browsers & search engines – hoping to see more on Jlo!

Not one to disappoint, Tim has even created a link for fans – that takes them to another site that focuses on the movie!

I’d emailed Tim last month asking him if he was being wooed by Hollywood, and this is what he had to say…

“…I am actually getting a brisk amount of traffic coming from people searching for J-Lo.  Unfortunately, not a lot of them are interested in backing up.  I did get a call from the movie people themselves, but they are mostly interested in seeing if I can link to their site, but they actually do not have one set up yet.  thebackupplanmovie.com is actually my site also; I started that when the traffic was spiking to my main site.  I wanted to try to divert the movie traffic to a site just for the movie, and leave my customers, prospects, and partners as the ones hitting my server.  So, on that site, I just started blogging about the movie and actors, and giving the fans of the actors a place to chat about the movie….”

In fact, when I last checked, Tim has even written an ode to The Backup Plan & JLo! He also blogged about the launch of the movie’s website and called it ‘cute’. He almost seems to be enjoying his new role; it certainly looks like Tim’s crossing over to the dark side! You could help avoid this by visiting his site; it would be great for him to get more people looking for the real backup plan!

It will be interesting to see how his traffic jumps when The Backup Plan (movie) releases in 2010! I’ll save that for a new post…next year!

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.