Part of what empowers Mirrored Storage’s top-notch virtualization and cloud backup and storage solutions is high-capacity colocation — essentially a cocoon that houses and protects your company or organization’s IT assets.

Here’s how colocating at CoreXchange helps Mirrored Storage serve you better:

Room to Grow

Our highly redundant, SSAE 16 SOC-1 Type II-compliant data centers provide single-server, half-rack, full-rack and private cage solutions. When your business grows, this abundance of space and options makes it easy to scale up IT assets along with it.

Higher Connectivity Capacity

The data centers’ connectivity capabilities include multiple, BGP-routed Tier-1 Internet backbones via one managed connection, as well as high-speed cross connection to all major carriers. This allows customers the connections required for mission-critical needs common to larger clients and applications such as Mirrored Storage’s high-capacity cloud storage.

For example, Mirrored Storage’s nightly customer backups are now finishing two to three hours more quickly than they were previously. This only enhances the company’s already top-notch data security capabilities.

Reliability, Security, and More…

This state-of-the-art power infrastructure is protected by KVA UPS systems and backed by redundant 1.5 MW generators. And we go a little bit overboard on security, with such a 24/7 staffed check-in station (with mantrap), video surveillance throughout the centers, and cutting edge lightening protection and fire suppression systems.

In other words, we provide the space, power and connectivity so that Mirrored Storage can provide their services efficiently and reliably.  Mirrored Storage can focus on what they do best – cloud backup and storage solutions. Our infrastructure simply serves as the foundation.

Common Beliefs about “The Cloud”:
- Information is Secure
- Stored in a location outside your local area
- Data Redundancy
- Monitored

The truth is that all of these thinks CAN be true, but commonly are NOT.  If questions are not asked and information presented to the contrary then you should assume none of them.  The reality is, as in many things in life, you get what you pay for.

Events of note:
- Major Cloud Server provider outages
- Popular Backup/File Share provider dropping security on ALL data for 16 hours
- Most popular Internet Email provider loss of >130k mailboxes occurred > 1 time
- Popular Consumer Backup disk failure and customer data lost
- Popular Consumer offering business service commonly “expires” data and removes it
- Largest Financial Institution loss of unencrypted backup tape

Mirrored Storage offers a comprehensive managed backup solution for businesses of all sizes.  Our offering is considered a Hybrid-Cloud solution.  We utilize the internet for the transmission of data from our customers to our Data Center provider, CoreXchange.  However, they are not offered without a contract and have strict security, encryption and access controls.

CoreXchange became our data center partner in March.  After a very smooth move we have enjoyed better bandwidth that we didn’t know we needed and no worries about power outages or physical access issues.  It was hard decision to make, but looking back it was the best decision we could have made.

Mirrored Storage offers these valuable services for prospective customers to get started:
- Free one hour assessment session to look at your data protection environment
- Free Virtualizing of YOUR server in our CoreXchange data center

Call or Email us today to schedule a call or meeting.
214-550-0550 / sales@mirroredstorage.com

After fighting the word Cloud, I am adopted it as what I have been doing for almost 3 years, do today and moving forward.  That was “Off-Site Managed Online Data Backup” is now “Managed Cloud Backup”.  I have changed the home page and will work on the rest of the site to represent the new name for the same offering.  The technical offering is the same with feature such as:
- Compression & Encryption of information
- Stored in a remote location
- Redundant copies of Data on my side
- Local Copy of data at no cost
- Incremental File, Database Email & Bitbackup Transmitted over the Internet or “Cloud”
- Daily Monitoring of the backups, Managed

I am also per-announcing here that I am finishing up the last couple of technology pieces of a cloud storage solution offering for my customers and prospects.  This new offering will have all the security, privacy, redundancy and flexibility that my backup services is known for.

This new offering will be branded as My Mirrored Storage Cloud aka MyMSCloud

Customers will be able to have local, cloud or both location for their data.  A very handy synchronization option if data stored in both locations or used off-line.  There are many options and flexibility available and it will ALL be managed, administered and of course backed up.

Stay Tuned!

Myths about the Cloud; things that may be implied but are NOT true:
- Information Secure
- Data Redundancy
- Stored in a location outside your local area
- Monitored

Events of note:
- Amazon EC3 Failure
- DropBox Security Breach
- Gmail Mailbox Loss
- Carbonite Lost Data
- My Backup Loss

What is the answers to these issues with who you are talking to or considering?

That got me thinking about what I do.  I have partners that I do work with that do data recovery either as part of their core service offerings or do that for their customers.  Since I do their backup off-site and optionally on-site that saying would apply to what I do.

The caveat is if “they” were a customer of mine before the data loss.
#1 If they were than no question, I recover their data.
#2 If not, then the question is weather their hardware was damaged and to what extent.

So the answer:
#1 NO COST
#2 Service cost or REALLY big costs for hardware recovery.

Want to know who is both happier and up and running the quickest?

Call Me to find out.

John
214-550-0550

The good news is that Google reported that users’ e-mails, contacts, folders and settings have not been lost. They are retrievable and should be back in users’ accounts once the problem is resolved.  Keep an eye on the dashboard.

“Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty,” wrote Ben Treynor, a Google vice president engineering and Site Reliability Czar, in a blog post . “That’s what happened to 0.02% of Gmail users yesterday, and we’re very sorry. The good news is that email was never lost and we’ve restored access for many of those affected. Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we’re making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon.”

The number of users affected has varied. At first, the company estimated that 0.08%, or 150,000 users had been affected. Later Monday, Google reduced that estimate to 0.02%, or 35,000.

On Monday afternoon, a Google spokesman told Computerworld that engineers had restored service to about a third of those affected.

In his blog Monday night, Treynor addressed the question of how this could happen if Google has multiple copies of users’ data in multiple data centers.

“Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data,” Treynor wrote. “That’s what happened here. Some copies of mail were deleted, and we’ve been hard at work over the last 30 hours getting it back for the people affected by this issue.”

He added that engineers have also archived to tape in order to save the data.

“To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape,” he said. “Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center , which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.”

Treynor said a detailed incident report will be posted to Google’s Apps Status Dashboard .

Our TAKE:

We believe that this highlights the importance of backup for businesses.  I was having lunch with a friend on Monday that told me has last company used Gmail so that they would not have to worry about backups — Oops!

Not all backup solutions are the same.  Check out our Ten Questions page for questions you should ask and get GOOD answers to from your backup person or provider.

John Neibel
Mirrored Storage, Inc.
www.mirroredstorage.com

Mirrored Storage has been offering that STANDARD for over 2 years and don’t require any special certification or product to do it.  Our clients that want this feature only need extra hard drive space on ANY computer, storage device or shared drive.  If a dedicated machine is desired for running the backup OR storage of the local backup we offer an appliance.

Here is a summary of what they are coming out with:

Mozy announced a strategic partnership with Cisco and Iomega. This marks the first collaboration where these two companies are going to include MozyPro in their respective storage offerings.

According to its maker, MozyPro solution can simplify the disaster recovery and business continuity plans of small businesses cost-effectively.

In a press release, Mozy explained that the need for simplified business disaster preparedness is continuously rising—leading small businesses to increasingly adopt safe, cost-effective backup and storage solutions. Mozy’s fully integrated backup service has a hybrid approach which combines local and online backup.

According to the company, this hybrid approach is fast gaining in popularity as this approach significantly helps in reducing the complex overhead and excessive administrative costs traditionally required by tape-based backup.

This hybrid solution is provided through the integration of MozyPro with one of several NAS vendors to simplify a company’s data protection stack. With two layers of redundant data protection, both local and online, SMBs can focus more on their business and worry less about data backup, the company explained.

MozyConnect integrated with Cisco NSS300 Series Smart Storage, as well as with Iomega StorCenter desktop and rackmount network storage devices, which are expected to give customers a fully integrated solution for backing up their critical business data locally on the device and online in Mozy’s secure datacenters.

“As we continue to protect more and more businesses with MozyPro, we have heard the growing need to offer this hybrid approach. We’re excited that Cisco and Iomega are the first two network-attached storage providers to work with us to fill this need, and we look forward to adding more vendors to our MozyConnect service in the future,” VP of product management for Mozy Russ Stockdale commented in a statement.

Mozy also announced that MozyConnect for Cisco Smart Storage is available now via Mozy direct sales and through Mozy resellers, as well as all Cisco partners.

MozyConnect for Iomega StorCenter Network Storage products is scheduled for availability in the spring of 2011.

Again, we have been doing this for 2 year AND not charging for it.

For more information please visit our website

Written by
John Neibel
President
Mirrored Storage, Inc
www.mirroredstorage.com

The reason is not hard to guess: with ever-growing quantities of photos and videos, the unlimited plan is financially unsustainable, the company said. In other words, it’s my fault.

You see, I’m a Mozy customer. I spent $82 for a two-year subscription and started inflicting my hundreds of gigabytes of photos and increasingly videos as well. I’m a photo nerd, so each 21-megapixel photo in raw format sucks up something like 20MB or 25MB, and each video is shot in 1080p so even shortish clips can occupy a half a gigabyte.

I’m somewhere in the top 0.3 percent in terms of my data use, but I’m also a leading indicator, and that’s why Mozy is altering course.

“There has been a change in consumer behavior,” said Russ Stockdale, Mozy’s vice president of product management. “What we have seen since we launched an unlimited service five years ago is there has been an explosion in digital content, specifically digital photos and video.”

In my case, with just under 600GB of data, the $3.40 per month I pay now will explode to just about $60 per month when my subscription runs its course in a few months.

That’s because Mozy will begin charging $5.99 per month for up to 50GB of data, with more costing $2 per month per 20GB after that. And, recognizing that more and more people have multiple computers to back up, it’s added a new multi-machine option costing $9.99 a month for up to 125GB and three computers. More computers or further 20GB increments add another $2 per month each.

Good-bye unlimited
Needless to say, I’m now looking at Mozy alternatives. But I don’t feel resentful–just sad at the disappearance of yet another uncapped part of the Net.

I’m grandfathered into an unlimited-data plan with T-Mobile UK, but if I leave to try to find a carrier with better service, they don’t have an unlimited plan for me, and I can’t go back to the T-Mobile plan. Likewise, my unlimited home broadband account actually has fair-use limits, as is customary in the U.K. My $25 a year at Flickr gets me unlimited photo storage, but it’s something of a holdout in an increasingly pay-as-you-go world.

And Mozy isn’t alone. Google Docs costs $1,400 a year for 400GB, for example, and Google’s Picasa Web Albums costs $100 per year for 400GB. Jungle Disk, which provides a front end to storage using Amazon’s S3 service, charges $3.15 per gigabyte per month. Carbonite, perhaps Mozy’s best-known competitor, throttles down bandwidth for big-data users. And up-and-comer Dropbox charges $20 per month for 100GB.

Here’s Mozy’s rationale for the change: the average storage per user increased more than 50 percent last year. More than half of the growth, though, was with the top 10 percent of the users, as measured by how much data that they have.

“The great majority of customers are growing at manageable levels, while the heaviest users bring up the average for the entire group,” Stockdale said.

Mozy braces itself
The company knows it’s in for some ill will.

“We do not take this on lightly…I don’t expect everybody to be happy about it. But if they take a look at what we’re doing and why, it’ll at least be understandable,” he said. Mozy is trying to make the change so it can provide sustainable high-quality backup in the long term” and not resort to fine-print shenanigans hoping few will notice.

The unlimited plans come to an end starting March 1, but last through the end of each customer’s paid subscription.

Not all of Mozy’s costs are going up. Hard drives can hold ever more data for a given price (2-terabyte drives can be had for $100 these days). But that’s not enough to deal with Mozy’s financial plight, Stockdale said.

I warned y’all last year “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is“.  Now Mozy confirms my statement/prediction:

“Mozy scraps unlimited backups”

The cost of storage is an element, but it is not even the majority of cost of providing the service,” Stockdale said. “The bandwidth, the data centers, the people who manage that–those costs are a larger part of the cost of providing this.”

Mozy, though a subsidiary of storage powerhouse EMC, uses its own software running on commodity storage systems. Later this year, though, to it’ll start moving users to EMC hardware and eventually migrate everyone, Stockdale said.

http://www.deals2buy.com/deals/jqwzkfhk49nbuta28ssrtch4t3hc4adxfaaft7wu7atyb9n7cd3q-ca-online-backup-10gb-unlimited-pcs1-year-subscript?utm_medium=rssalldeals&source=rssalldeals

It highlights what is WRONG with Bogus FREE Online Backup offerings.  With this offer you get software free, storage cheep & storage limited?  What doesn’t “compute” for you?  Summary of this offer is 44.99 Tax Software (really free if you check ANY H&R Block sites), Online Backup Software w/ unlimited storage and 10gb of backup storage.  Anyone see and issue?

I have to admit that I run up against the FREE/Unlimited issue every week.  I reply with a simple questions “If it sounds to good to be true do you believe it?”  For us folks in our 40′s we relate to the old Columbia Record & Tape offer of “12 albums and tapes for a PENNY”.  The reality was that we had to buy the next 18 records for $24 each when the retail prices were $12 each.