Progent's Online Expertise for Popular Backup and Recovery Products
Backing up is critical at any level of computing, and dozens of backup/recovery technologies and products are in use to address this need. Solutions can be as simple as the tar and gzip utilities in the Linux/UNIX world or as comprehensive as Microsoft Data Protection Manager for Windows environments. Unfortunately, many legacy solutions are more expensive to maintain and operate than to replace, and many backup products adopted without careful planning fail to deliver the availability and protection a business really needs. Progent's extensive team of IT experts can provide affordable online support to help you manage or deploy popular backup/restore products for all major operating systems and any network topology.
In addition to offering small and mid-size companies ProSight Data Protection Services for low-cost and fully managed cloud backup, Progent can also provide online access to IT engineers with expertise in a wide range of products and technologies for backing up Windows, Apple, and Linux/UNIX servers and desktops as well as laptops, iPads, and smartphones. Progent can help you design, enhance, or troubleshoot backup systems for a variety of architectures including local, edge to datacenter, across premises, cloud-based, or hybrid. In addition, Progent's certified VMware consultants, Hyper-V experts, and Citrix specialists can show you how to follow leading practices to deploy virtualization technology for continuous transparent backup and ultra-fast recovery. Progent can also help you migrate from a legacy backup solution to a state-of-the-art system that can save you money while reducing or eliminating scheduled downtime and accelerating recovery.
Backup products for which Progent can provide consulting and troubleshooting support include:
Barracuda Backup incorporates technology developed by Intronis, a company Barracuda acquired, to provide a flexible backup solution for on-premises, virtual, cloud-hosted, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environments. For disaster recovery, Barracuda supports data replication to the Barracuda Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or any private site you designate. Progent is a Barracuda partner and can help you design, deploy or troubleshoot a Barracuda backup environment, or Progent can provide end-to-end managed services so you can outsource your entire backup and disaster recovery solution. For more information about Progent's support services for Barracuda Backup, see Barracuda Backup and disaster recovery consulting.
Altaro VM Backup offers onsite backup, offsite replication with WAN acceleration, granular restore, cloud-based management, and automated backup verification. You can backup VMs as frequently as every 5 minutes for an optimize4d Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Augmented Inline Deduplication reduces backup storage requirements and delivers industry-leading speed for backups and restores. Progent is an Altaro partner and can help you plan, configure or troubleshoot an Altaro backup system. Progent also offers comprehensive managed services so you can outsource your entire Altaro backup/restore solution to Progent's certified experts. To learn more about Progent's consulting services for Altaro VM Backup, visit Progent's Altaro VM Backup consulting and management services.
Microsoft Azure Backup is a cloud-based subscription backup/restore service optimized for Microsoft workloads. Protected workloads can be in the Azure cloud, in virtual machines, or on physical servers. Azure Backup keeps three copies of your data in three locations in the Azure datacenter and three additional copies in an Azure datacenter in a different geographical area. Backup schedules can be daily, monthly, weekly, and yearly and retention in Azure can be as long as 99 years. After the initial seeding, backups are incremental. To avoid the massive online data transfer that may be required for the seeding process, the initial backup can be performed at your site and then the physical media can be delivered to the nearest Azure datacenter. Features include client-side encryption and compression, off-peak throttling, and application-aware granular recovery (e.g., mailbox recovery for Exchange, database level recovery for SQL, and Item Level Recovery (ILR) for SharePoint). Azure Backup supports System Center Data Protection Manager integration for advanced management and reporting. (Learn about Progent's Microsoft Azure planning and cloud integration consulting services.)
DoubleTake Software, which has been acquired and rebranded by Carbonite, offers a line of economical products that allow small organizations to protect critical Windows-based applications such as Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and SharePoint. DoubleTake products work with Windows Hyper-V and VMware and also support Windows Server clusters to increase network availability and reduce recovery time. DoubleTake Backup lets you perform on-demand recoveries to server hardware that is different from the original server, or between virtual and physical servers. DoubleTake Availability, now called Carbonite Availability, allows you to configure failover clusters without shared storage or geographic restrictions, reducing the vulnerability of Windows-based clustering to single-point failure. For more information about DoubleTake and to find out how Progent can help you deploy and maintain this platform, see Progent's Double-Take consulting services.
Backup Exec from Symantec has evolved for three decades and is among the most popular backup solutions for home and small business environments. The current version of Backup Exec provides disk or tape backup and can restore files, folders, individual emails, or entire servers. Special agents are available for point-in-time recovery of Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle databases as well as SharePoint and Active Directory applications and virtual guests based on Windows Hyper-V or VMware. Backup Exec also supports Linux, UNIX, and Mac clients. An easy-to-use administration console simplifies the process of setting up backups, managing backup policies, performing restores, and deploying virtual machines for fast disaster recovery.
BackupAssist is a low-cost software package for scheduling, managing, and monitoring backups of Microsoft Windows Server and Windows Small Business Server (SBS) products. Designed for small and midsize businesses, BackupAssist allows local or remote backups of complete servers or individual files and supports physical and virtual environments. Supported storage includes Windows-compatible tape, Iomega REV devices, internal or external hard drives and optical disks, NAS and SNAP network storage, and any remote machine that can act as an FTP server. BackupAssist includes a restore console with an easy-to-use search feature for recovering files. Snap-ins are available for Exchange Server, SQL Server, Hyper-V, and Rsync.
HP Data Protector (previously called Openview Storage Data Protector) is an enterprise-class backup/recovery solution that supports physical, virtual and cloud-based environments powered by Windows, Unix, and Linux. Virtual platforms supported include VMware, Windows Hyper-V and Virtual Server, Citrix XenServer, and HP Integrity Virtual Machines. Advanced federated data deduplication reduces storage costs, improves performance and availability, and conserves bandwidth for multi-site architectures. Used in conjunction with the HP StoreOnce backup appliance, Data Protector can deduplicate to any application source, backup server, or target device independent of operating system. With the Granular Recovery Extension (GRE) for SharePoint 2010, Microsoft SharePoint administrators can restore an individual or an entire folder without leaving SharePoint.
CrashPlan offers free entry-level software for on-premises backup as well as a line of affordably priced web service packages for continual or scheduled online backup for Mac, Windows, and Linux environments. CrashPlan is designed primarily for households and small office environments and is especially popular in the Apple Mac market. In a Windows environment, CrashPlan can transparently back up locked and in-use files via Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy technology. For Mac environments, CrashPlan allows you to back up any networked drives accessible from the Desktop.
Mozy is a web backup service operated by VMware that focuses on the home and small office markets by providing automated online backup and on-demand data recovery for Mac and Windows systems. MozyPro is the advanced version of this online service and offers small businesses centralized management of multiple systems via a web-based administrative console. MozyEnterprise includes Active Directory integration. Mozy is particularly popular in the Mac market and offers an application for iPhone and Android smartphones that allows you to send files protected by Mozy as an email attachment or view any protected files that are in a format supported your smartphone.
Acronis Backup and Recovery is designed as an affordable and easy-to-use solution that provides small businesses with entry-level backup and disaster recovery capabilities for Windows and Linux servers and workstations. Disk-based storage provides fast recovery, and an Online version supports automatic offsite backups. The Virtual Edition of Acronis Backup and Recovery supports major virtualization platforms including VMware vSphere/ESX/ESXi, VMware vCloud Director, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
Retrospect for Macintosh builds on a 20-year history of affordable Mac backup and now offers network backup of Mac, Windows, and Linux computers. Current versions of Retrospect feature data deduplication to cut storage costs and bandwidth utilization plus cloud-based storage capability for any Internet-connected storage configured for WebDAV access. A 64-bit Mac client supports OS X and provides enhanced security with 256-bit AES encryption, reportedly doubles the performance of previous versions, and allows users to run on-demand backups from their desktops. Integrated Growl notifications alert users when backup operations are initiated or finished.
Time Machine is an automatic backup utility included with Apple's Mac OS X from the Leopard (10.5) version onward and works with Apple's wireless Time Capsule device as well as with directly-connected hard drives or partitions. Time Machine transparently archives hourly backups for a day, daily backups for a week, and weekly backups for as long as there is space. When the backup volume is full, Time Machine automatically deletes the oldest weekly backup. In order to conserve storage and bandwidth, Time Machine copies only files that have changed since the last backup. Users can perform point-in-time system recovery or file-level recovery.
VMware Data Recovery (VDR) is VMware's first-generation backup solution for small businesses. A VDR backup appliance supports up to 100 virtual machines (VMs), operates transparently, and offers deduplication to remove redundant data. Integration with VMware vCenter Server enables centralized scheduling and allows virtual machines to be backed up when they are moved using VMware VMotion or DRS. Backups can be stored on any virtual disk supported by VMware ESX/ESXi including storage area networks (SANs), network attached storage (NAS) devices, or Common Internet File System (CIFS) based storage such as SAMBA. vSphere Data Protection (VDP), which replaces VDR, is a backup/recovery solution based on EMC Avamar technology. VDP offers more efficient deduplication and permits agentless VM backup.
For enterprises environments, Progent offers the support of a VCDX certified VMware Site Recovery Manager consultant and VMware NSX network virtualization expert to help plan, configure and manage a secure, world-class disaster recovery/application mobility solution for private cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments.
Solaris FLARs backup/restore technology allows you to create system snapshots known as Oracle Solaris Flash archives (FLARs). These snapshots can include the operating system, updates, and application software. Oracle Solaris FLARs can be rapidly deployed or restored to any server as long as it has the same processor architecture. Because of the speed with which they can be deployed, FLARs are a popular way to install Oracle Solaris from a pre-built image as well as for implementing patches or performing disaster recovery. Current versions of Oracle Solaris support the ability to install from a ZFS Flash Archive as well as a UFS FLAR.
How Progent Can Help You Maintain or Create a Backup/Restore Solution
Progent's nationwide team of online support engineers includes consultants with expertise in Windows, Linux/UNIX, and Mac environments and familiar with popular backup applications and services, including many legacy products which no longer have vendor support. Progent can help businesses of any size objectively evaluate the effectiveness of their existing data protection solution, provide technical support for their current system, build the business case for moving to a new platform or modifying their backup architecture or procedures, and plan and manage upgrades or migrations. Progent can provide the services of world-class network experts, such as Cisco-certified CCIE engineers, to help you build and maintain an efficient network infrastructure for your backup/restore solution, and also offers the help of certified CISSP-certified cybersecurity consultants and disaster recovery/business continuity planning experts to help you design a backup/restore solution that meets your business needs and stays within your IT budget.
Support for Migrating to a New Backup/Restore Solution
Because of the diversity of technologies involved in various backup/recovery products, many of them proprietary and/or outdated, moving to a new system can be complex and requires the breadth of knowledge available only from an IT support firm with extensive experience in a wide variety of platforms. Progent has the experience and technical scope needed to help clients understand the technical risks and business benefits of migrating to a new backup platform and can help you plan and execute a move to a solution that adds significant business value to your information network. Progent's experience with mixed-platform environments can be especially helpful for companies whose backup systems have evolved piecemeal over the years or who are undergoing consolidations, acquisitions, or operating system upgrades.
Additional Non-stop Technologies Provided by Progent's Experts
Progent's Microsoft and Cisco-certified consulting experts can help your business to build a sensible, zero-downtime network that resolves critical problems covering a wide range of networking technologies and processes such as:
Workplace Recovery Planning
Progent's business continuity consultants can help you design a disaster recovery plan that will allow you to resume network functionality in case of an IT network catastrophe. Progent can help you to create a complete disaster recovery strategy that incorporates periodic disaster recovery evaluations and drills. Progent's Microsoft and Cisco-authorized consultants can also show you how to create an affordable, non-stop system architecture that addresses availability issues covering a wide array of infrastructure technologies and procedures. To read more, go to Disaster Recovery Consulting and Support Services.
Managed Cloud Backup: ProSight Data Protection Services
ProSight Data Protection Services offer small and mid-sized organizations a low cost and fully managed solution for reliable backup/disaster recovery (BDR). Available at a low monthly cost, ProSight Data Protection Services automates your backup processes and allows rapid restoration of critical files, applications and virtual machines that have become unavailable or corrupted due to component failures, software glitches, disasters, human mistakes, or malware attacks like ransomware. ProSight Data Protection Services can help you protect, recover and restore files, folders, applications, system images, plus Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware virtual machine images. Critical data can be backed up on the cloud, to an on-promises device, or mirrored to both. Progent's cloud backup consultants can provide world-class expertise to configure ProSight DPS to to comply with regulatory standards such as HIPAA, FINRA, PCI and Safe Harbor and, whenever necessary, can help you to restore your critical information. Learn more about ProSight Data Protection Services Managed Backup.
Windows Server 2016 Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Progent's Windows Server 2016 disaster recovery experts can help your organization to plan and deploy a disaster recovery system built around Microsoft's cloud-tested Failover Clustering tools such as Cluster Operating System Rolling Upgrade for non-intrusive migration to Windows Server 2016, Storage Replica for zero-data-loss recovery, Storage Spaces Direct for high-performance storage clusters using industry-standard equipment, Virtual Machine Load Balancing for improving the speed and resilience of Failover Clusters while reducing capital investment and management overhead, and Cloud Witness for fast, economical creation of a stretch cluster quorum witness. For more information, go to Microsoft Server 2016 Disaster Recovery Help.
Microsoft Server 2012 Failover Clusters
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 introduced enterprise-class availability and recoverability to Microsoft's clustering platform. Windows Server 2012 R2 adds to this foundation and provides important improvements that offer increased expandability, non-stop storage uptime for server applications, streamlined administration, quicker failover, and more flexibility for designing clusters. To find out more, go to Windows Server 2012 Clustering Consulting and Support.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Disaster Recovery Solutions
VMware's Site Recovery Manager is an extension to VMware vCenter that lets you define, automate and test a repeatable runbook for restoring applications and services rapidly following a breakdown. SRM provides centrally controlled and automated recovery, application mobility, plus transparent site migration, failback and re-protect. Site Recovery Manager also enables non-intrusive testing for disaster recovery, updates and patches and can generate reports to confirm complete service restoration, validate SLAs and demonstrate disaster recovery compliance. Progent offers the skills of a VCDX certified VMware Site Recovery Manager consultant to help you to design, configure, test and maintain a DR system based on VMware SRM.
NetApp MetroCluster High Availability and Disaster Recovery Platform
NetApp MetroCluster is a disaster recovery software suite that combines array-based storage clustering with continual replication to provide fast, zero data loss disaster recovery between sites that are up to 300km apart from each other. Progent offers access to a NetApp MetroCluster consultant who can assist your business to design, configure, administer, update, test and troubleshoot a disaster recovery solution built around NetApp MetroCluster. Progent can assist you to choose a topology for your MetroCluster deployment that meets your functional requirements and IT budget. Progent can ensure you follow best practices for installing your MetroCluster solution by providing guidance with procedures like assigning disk pools, determining plexes layout, setting up NetApp FlexVol volumes, setting up NetApp Snapshot, installing Cisco and Brocade switches, designing a tiebreaker mechanism, designing a configuration replication network, and verifying your MetroCluster DR system to prove adherence with industry standards and regulatory mandates.
Network Load Balancing
Progent provides high availability load balancing support covering network load balancing, load balanced applications, network backbone routing, and content dispatching products such as F5 Networks 3DNS. Fault tolerant load balancing solutions for which Progent can provide consulting services include Windows Server 2003 and 2008 Network Load Balancing Manager, Citrix Access Suite and Access Gateway, Cisco Content Services Switch, Cisco Distributed Director and LocalDirector 400 series, and F5 Networks BIG-IP. To find out more, go to Fault Tolerant Load Balancing.
High-Availability Internet Data Centers
Progent's Data Center engineers can help you select high availability data centers that meet the particular requirements of your business. High availability off-site data centers are particularly attractive to small and mid-size organizations because of their low cost and simplified logistics compared to taking a do-it-yourself approach. Trying to build an in-house data center that offers even a minimum degree of fault tolerance is financially prohibitive for typical small organizations. Progent is ready to show you how to reap all the advantages of high-availability Internet data centers by providing a complete range of engineering and support services. To learn more, visit Non-stop Internet Data Centers Consulting.
Failsafe Inter-office Connectivity
Progent’s branch office network infrastructure professionals can help companies achieve zero-downtime branch office connectivity by means of fully redundant system architectures with automatic failover. Progent’s Cisco-premier CCIE network engineers can design and deploy fault-tolerant Inter-office networks supported by zero-downtime EIGRP routers or zero-downtime OSPF configurations of Cisco routers. Progent can demonstrate how redundant connections and automatic fail-over can provide economical non-stop interoffice connectivity. To read more, see High-Availability Inter-office Connectivity.
High Availability Internet Connectivity
Progent's Cisco-authorized IT professionals can show you how to design an economical, fault tolerant Internet connection solution that can deliver 24x7 Internet connectivity through a wide range of high availability Internet access solutions including high availability BGP, transparent fail-over, and redundant ISPs. Progent can provide Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert consultants to show you how to utilize the latest techniques for high availability Internet access to build an affordable, completely redundant Internet interface with automatic failover and other capabilities to create zero-downtime Internet connections. For details, see Fault Tolerant Internet Access Solutions.
System Center Data Protection Manager Backup and Restore Consulting and Support Services
Progent's expert System Center Data Protection Manager engineers can assist your company to create an effective business continuity strategy, implement an affordable high-availability IT architecture, install a System Center Data Protection Manager-powered backup and recovery system, comprehensively validate your DPM system, train your administrative staff or regular consultants how to manage Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, or provide extensive IT outsourcing such as off-site housing of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager servers in Progent's secure data center. To read more, visit System Center Data Protection Manager Consulting.
Barracuda Backup Multi-site and Cloud Data Backup and Disaster Recovery
Barracuda Backup is an affordable, subscription backup/restore platform for small and medium-size businesses. A Barracuda Backup deployment can incorporate a purpose-built physical storage device manufactured by Barracuda or a software-based appliance with similar features but which utilizes your own storage infrastructure. Barracuda Backup protects vital company data generated on-premises, at one or more remote sites, or in the cloud. For disaster protection, you can replicate data to the Barracuda Cloud, to Amazon AWS, or to any site with a physical or virtual Barracuda appliance. Progent is a certified Barracuda partner and Progent's Barracuda Backup consultants offer a wide range of consulting support services to help you to plan, configure, operate and repair a backup and disaster recovery system built on Barracuda technology. For additional information, visit Barracuda Backup and disaster recovery consulting and management.
Altaro VM Backup Solutions for Data Protection and Disaster Recovery
Altaro VM Backup software offers small organizations a dependable and affordable platform for backing up and recovering Hyper-V and VMware-powered virtual machines. Altaro VM Backup can be deployed in local, offsite, distributed, and cloud-hosted environments and also enables low-cost backup to Azure storage. Top features include state-of-the-art inline deduplication to cut backup storage requirements, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) with backup intervals as little as five minutes for reducing your Recovery Point Objective, military-grade encryption, item-level recovery options for specific files and emails, extensive support for Windows Server CSV and VMware vCenter for handling large-scale environments, and the ability to leverage Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service to back up live VMs with zero downtime. Progent is an Altaro partner and offers a wide array of consulting services to assist you to plan, install, manage and troubleshoot a backup and disaster recovery system based on Altaro VM Backup software. To find out more, see Altaro VM Backup Consulting.
Consulting for Double-Take Solutions for Backup and Recovery
Double-Take publishes a family of products designed to provide small companies a variety of affordable alternatives for replicating and recovering business-critical workloads including Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Blackberry, and Microsoft SharePoint. Progent’s business continuity planning consultants have extensive experience incorporating Double-Take products into small business information systems to create a high state of fault tolerance and business continuity capability at an affordable price. To learn more, visit Consulting Services Double-Take Software for Backup.
CRISC-Premier IT Risk Management
The Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC) program was initiated by ISACA in 2010 to verify an IT professional's skills to design, implement, and maintain information system control mechanisms to reduce risk. Progent offers the expertise of a CRISC-certified consultant to assist your company to create and carry out a workplace continuity plan that follows industry best practices identified by CRISC and geared to match your organization's risk tolerance, business goals, and budgetary guidelines. For details, see CRISC-Certified IT risk control experts.
Why Choose Progent for Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Planning?
Because Progent is a Microsoft Certified Partner and offers professional application consulting for a broad variety of small business software programs, Progent can assist clients to arrive at complete IT solutions that substantially enhance the business value of your information system. As a Registered Partner for Cisco, Progent can provide the services of premier engineers and specialists with expertise in designing, implementing and maintaining infrastructure solutions based on Cisco products. The broad scope of Progent's technical experience and Progent's sensitivity to the requirements of small and midsize businesses make Progent a great partner for creating and maintaining a cost-effective, dependable information system.
How to Contact Progent's Consultants for Business Continuity Planning Help
If you wish to ask Progent about professional support for disaster recovery planning, call