In this update (StorageCraft Cloud Offering and more):
- What they talked about at the Roadshow
What they talked about at the Roadshow
Thank you for your continued support of Soft Solutions as your preferred StorageCraft distributor. We appreciate your business, and trust that our services to you, especially around ordering, advance renewal quoting and technical knowledge, continue to deliver everything you need.
StorageCraft came through the country last week with a series of new presentations, talking about the roadmap and the new StorageCraft Cloud offering. The short description is that Cloud lives in a Sydney data centre and as well as being an off-site repository for client backups you can mount volumes to retrieve individual files and even stand up a backup in the cloud to give a client server access until their normal host is restored. It was stressed that the StorageCraft cloud offering is a DR tool, and not hosting, so they would like to discourage a server being kept up for longer than 30 days.
We were told that a new version 5.2 of ShadowProtect is due soon, a maintenance update rather than any major feature enhancement. We were also told that UEFI support will finally be available in the recovery environment soon and a new version of ShadowStream is coming along.
There was a review of a number of small but significant features that have been added to the third-party Watchdog software for backup testing – details on those updates can be found at the following URL http://www.watchdogsoftware.com.au/kb/files/WD051.pdf.
One of the messages Greg Wyman shared is while StorageCraft Cloud can be used as an archive for a customer, it’s a very expensive solution for that purpose. One of his slides talked rather about having your on-site images transferred to both a cloud storage destination and StorageCraft cloud. This gives you the most recent backups in the cloud to deliver DR for those who feel they need immediate access in the event of failure (and who have an internet plan that makes it affordable to send images and incrementals to Australia) but you avoid paying higher charges to maintain the longer history. Greg talked about this in the context of Amazon Web Services but that is over in Australia too, so we would like to remind you that Soft Solutions has it’s own low-cost storage available to you here in New Zealand, with SOS.
The technical stream was presented by someone new to us in New Zealand, Karl Thomson, but he certainly knew his subject. The Q&A was well worth it. (Hint that if you didn’t go, and the event is near you, you should send someone along to the technical next time).
Soft Solutions Sales
Phone: 0-9-306 0450, Freephone: 0-800-733 233, E-mail: sales@sofsol.co.nz
