LiveVault Woos Remote-Office and SMB Backup Market
Remote branch offices and small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs) face unique data-protection needs. I spoke with LiveVault (http://www.livevault.com) CEO Bob Cramer and Vice President of Marketing Scott Jarr about two new LiveVault releases that address those needs: LiveVault InControl, which provides disk-based online backup and recovery for remote offices of larger enterprises, and LiveVault InSync, which enhances the vendor's data-protection service offering for SMBs. "Central IT organizations do a good job of running, testing, and recovering data and have a ten to twenty percent failure rate. But SMBs and remote offices have a much higher failure rate, and that's who we target," Bob said.

Both solutions include a new, disk-based onsite appliance, LiveVault TurboRestore, which enables faster restores. "Our customers wanted 'hands-free' branch operation, where remote-office data comes back to the central office," Scott said. LiveVault InControl is "one hundred percent centrally managed" and with LiveVault InSync, "everything is automated. The SMB connects and automatically backs up to the offsite location, completely unattended."

—Anne Grubb

File Fragmentation: Performance Problem or More?
I recently spoke with Michael Materie, Diskeeper Corporation's (formerly Executive Software—http://www.executive.com) product manager, about the Diskeeper 9 defragmentation utility. Michael pointed me to a variety of Microsoft Knowledge Base articles that identify fragmentation of files, the pagefile, and the NTFS Master File Table (MFT—all of which Diskeeper helps defragment) as the cause of specific performance problems. Only a few of the articles say that defragmentation is part of the resolution, however.

Defragmentation clearly helps I/O performance. Both Michael and many IT pros swear by defragmentation to solve and prevent mysterious non-performance–related problems. If you use Diskeeper or otherwise regularly defragment your hard disk, do you think defragmentation has more than just performance benefits? Post a comment to this article at http://www.windowsitpro.com, InstantDoc ID 46620, and tell me what you think.

—Adam Carheden

One-Button Failover Boosts Availability
When a critical server goes down, will your failover process work? MessageOne (http://www.messageone.com) found that its customers couldn't always answer this question affirmatively and, in response, developed OneSwitch, a Web browser–based console that's linked to MessageOne's data-replication and failover service. OneSwitch allows failovers on multiple platforms, taking the complexity and risk out of the failover and restore process, said Paul D'Arcy, MessageOne vice president of marketing.

"Customers aren't really buying replication; they want certainty that data will be available," Paul said. OneSwitch makes performing failovers and restores a "one-button" process that minimizes manual error, simplifies failover so that any employee can initiate a failover in the event of a disaster, and allows multiple servers to be failed over simultaneously. The service provides typical failover times of around 5 minutes for most applications and, at most, 9 to 14 minutes for Microsoft Exchange Server, which tends to be the most complex application to fail over and restore. "For many sites, there's no acceptable downtime. Reducing hours of downtime to a fifteen-minute window is a big deal," Paul said.

—Anne Grubb

Symantec Adds Console to LiveState Recovery 3.0
As part of a continuing evolution in its disk-based backup and recovery products, Symantec (http://www.symantec.com) released Symantec LiveState Recovery Manager, an add-on to the Symantec LiveState Recovery 3.0 suite that lets you monitor numerous desktops and servers via one console. The product is the first solution to be offered as part of Symantec's Unified LiveState architecture, said Steve Fairbanks, Symantec's director of product management.

With the release of LiveState Recovery Manager, Steve said that Symantec is "taking a best-of-breed system-level point recovery solution to an enterprise solution. Customers wanted an enterprise solution that they can use to centrally manage desktop and server agents throughout an organization." According to Steve, future releases under the Unified LiveState architecture umbrella will be increasingly integrated with Symantec's security offerings and will offer more granular backup policies and the ability to respond proactively to security events.

—Anne Grubb

End of Article


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Reader Comments

My company bought the LiveState Recovery Console package recently and wow were we ever disappointed. This product amounts to nothing more than a public beta test due to the clunky nature of its agent install process (which by the way uninstalls previous versions of what we thought were the same LiveState product to another version that the console works with). This product has a ways to go and we sure are glad that we purchased the upgrade insurance with the software, otherwise talk about a half baked product for the time being.

dma- July 05, 2005

Article Rating 4 out of 5

Regarding your article on Executive Software's Diskeeper.

Here’s the thing. Windows is so complicated that I can never tell what causes the shut downs, lock ups, and problems so many of us encounter every day. In fact, when I call some far away technical support groupie, wait on hold for an hour, go through the mundane and routine line of questions that I always have to endure when calling tech support and finally get them to understand what happened, they always give me some routine and just as mundane fix that I could have, and probably already did, myself. They can never get to the root of the issue.

I consider myself pretty smart when it comes to Windows but so many programs are created and so much junk is installed and left behind while using Windows that—in defense of tech support groupies—it’s nearly impossible to tell what causes the actual problem.

All I know is that once Diskeeper was installed, 98% of these issues seemed to have just gone away.

Who am I to question why?

Prozit- July 22, 2005

Article Rating 5 out of 5

I have found Diskeeper to be less intrusive on other processes while it performs its tasks. Experience with default defragmenters shows that sometimes they will hang or get stuck on a given section of the hard disk. This is an extremely important problem solved by using Diskeeper over the Windows built-in defragmenter. The best feature of automatic defragmentation is improved read-time access.

bobkranson,bobkranson- July 22, 2005

Article Rating 4 out of 5

Diskkeeper's claim that defragging solves more than just performance problems does seem a little dubious. However as a programmer it's clear enough that if a computer is very low on memory then paging times might cause timouts on synchronization objects, which are often set to 60 seconds (I'm thinking particularly of the waitForSingleObject and the mutliple version). A timeout would result in spurious failures as the particular objects in any partiucular instance of a timeout would be random. This is particularly true in apps that have improperly used exception handling (which is common amoung even experienced programmers, and more so in the case of C++). I can't imagine that many computers would be affected, but then again Exchange does seem to be very memory hungry. However one more likely scenario of a similar nature is perhaps startup speed. Even on relatively speedy machines so many services and non-service background apps can be launched that it can take some time to reach UI responsiveness even with plenty of RAM. Perhaps a decent defragger that also defrags paging files, registry hives, the MFT, and that does application sequential re-ordering would be necessariy to avoid timeouts on startup. Its also concievable that synchronization timeouts are not alone in causing failures under these conditions. Having said all the above I would still like to see diskkeeper backup its assertions properly. As it stands their claims would seem to constitute a kind of blackmailing of the fearful sysadmin.

lorriman- July 25, 2005

Article Rating 3 out of 5

 
 

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