Disaster Recovery Consulting Support

ProSight Data Protection Services - Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup
Hyper-V and VMware Virtual Server Backup and Restore
ProSight DPS Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup is a fully managed subscription service intended to offer small and middle-size organizations a reliable and low-cost option for protecting Hyper-V and VMware-based VMs. Altaro VM Backup can be used with on-premises, offsite, multi-location, and cloud based network models and also offers cost-effective cloud backup to an Azure Block Blob storage account.

Key capabilities of ProSight Hornetsecurity Altaro VM Backup include advanced Augmented Inline Deduplication to cut backup storage requirements, Continuous Data Protection with backup intervals down to five minutes for minimizing your vulnerability to data loss, enterprise-class encryption, granular recovery options for entire virtual machines or for individual files and emails, full integration with Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware, and the ability to leverage Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) technology to protect live VMs with no downtime.

Progent is a certified Hornetsecurity Altaro partner and offers a broad range of services to assist your business to design, deploy, test and troubleshoot a backup/restore system built on Altaro's VM Backup technology. Progent also offers ProSight Data Protection Services Altaro VM Backup as a Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) package to deliver remote management of your backup system. Progent's Windows Hyper-V experts and VMware specialists can help you to plan and maintain virtual machine environments that use local or offsite VMs or that run in a hybrid architecture that combines local and cloud assets. In addition, Progent can provide business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) planning expertise to help you to get ready for catastrophic events such as ransomware attacks and natural disasters.

Major Features of Altaro VM Backup
Altaro VM Backup is built to address the backup/recover requirements of most small and medium-size organizations and offers ease of management plus a comprehensive feature set typically available exclusively in enterprise-grade platforms. Altaro backs up widely used releases of Windows Hyper-V and VMware vCenter and supports most backup hardware:

Altaro VM Backup comes with powerful features in crucial areas of data protection such as backup replication, prompt recovery, and centralized management.

Replication
Altaro VM Backup delivers rapid, economical, and secure backup for data protection plus remote data replication for dependable restoration. Top backup and replication features include:

• Ransomware Defense via Immutable Cloud Storage: Immutability for cloud storage allows tamper-proof data while under the defined policy so that backup data cannot be erased or modified by any user including administrators or root users. This provides another level of protection and restoration ability in case of a successful ransomware attack.
• Augmented In-Line Deduplication: Altaro's in-line deduplication saves only altered data to backup devices, conserving bandwidth, cutting storage requirements, and enhancing throughput. Altaro's deduplication works with data on single virtual machines and across many virtual machines.
• Continuous Data Protection (CDP): Rather than running one-a-day backups, you can schedule backup intervals to as short as five minutes to lower your Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
• Concurrency: You can back up many VMs at the same time, allowing you to conduct backup operations within briefer low-activity time windows when the most network bandwidth is open and network performance is less urgent.
• Live Backup: Altaro's integration with Volume Shadow Copy Service permits you to back up virtual machines without requiring downtime.
• Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter: The ability to back up virtual machines within a Hyper-V Failover Cluster (with or without CSV) or within a vCenter system allows large-scale deployments.
• Offsite Replication: To facilitate business recovery, you can deploy the Altaro Offsite Server tool on an external server for storing a copy of your backups at a remote site.
• Flexible Scheduling and Retention Policies: You can set different backup schedules and retention policies for individual VMs.
  
  Scheduling and retention policies for Altaro VM Backup are simple to configure, check and revise

• Workload Specific Backups: Altaro VM Backup can utilize Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and all VSS Writers working within the protected virtual machine when executing a backup. Apps such as Exchange and Microsoft SQL will sense the backup has taken place and automatically run the relevant maintenance tasks like truncating VLFs.
• Military-Grade Encryption: Before copying your data to a backup destination, you have the option of encrypting it using the AES-256 standard.
• Virtual Disk Exclusion: You can select which Virtual Disks to include or exclude in your VM backups.
• Grandfather-Father-Son Archiving (GFS): Besides your continuous and scheduled backups, you can implement an additional schedule to make and archive a new backup copy each week, month and year.
• Cloud Backup to Azure: Altaro supports backup to an Azure Block Blob account, which is the lowest priced storage option offered on the Microsoft Azure cloud.
  
  Altaro Virtual Machine Backup allows you to back up VMs hosted on-site, offsite or in the cloud

• Cloud Backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi: Altaro VM Backup VM Backup allows native backup to Amazon S3 and Wasabi clouds. No additional resources running in the cloud are needed to support storage for backup.
• Back up to multiple off-premises datacenters: For improved resilience, you can create copies of virtual machines on multiple remote sites including multiple clouds such as Azure and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

• Recover as Clone: You can recover a VM backup to a new location with a new name, allowing the cloned virtual machine to operate side by side with the original virtual machine. This eliminates the need to overwrite live VMs.
• Recover to Different Host: You can restore a virtual machine backup to a different host. The virtual machine can be restored from the on-prem backup location, or directly from the offsite copy location. (You may not cross-recover between Hyper-V and VMware.)
• Boot from Backup: You can instantly boot any virtual machine version directly from the backup device either for verification purposes or to create a significant improvement in RTO in a disaster recovery event.
• File-Level Recovery: You can quickly restore individual files from any virtual machine copy.
• WAN-Optimized Replication: You can create continuous copies of your VMs to an off-premises location and transfer immediately to the backup site in case a calamity disables your primary VMs. This can significantly improve your Recovery Time Objective and put you back online fast.
• Microsoft Exchange Item-Level Recovery: You can restore individual emails and attachments from within the Exchange Mailbox database.
  
  Altaro VM Backup enables you to recover specific emails from an Exchange Mailbox

• Recover Various Versions: You can recover from multiple periods instead of being limited to the last backup copy.
• Sandbox Restores and Verification: This feature lets you program or launch manually test drills to assess the accuracy of your backup data. You can verify backup folders without connecting the virtual machine to your Hyper-V or VMware host, or you can execute a full confirmation recovery to a replicant and verify that the recovered virtual machine can boot.
• Backup Health Monitor: Backup copy integrity can be monitored on demand and repaired automatically as a component of the subsequent backup process.

Download ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services Datasheet
To view a datasheet describing the major capabilities of ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services, click:
Progent's ProSight Altaro VM Backup Services Datasheet. (PDF - 310 KB)

How Progent Can Help You to Get the Most from Altaro VM Backup
Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Server Server Hyper-V planning and deployment experts and VMware-certified vSphere and vCenter consultants can help your organization to design, deploy and manage a backup/recover system based on Altaro VM Backup software. Progent's Exchange experts can help you to utilize Altaro VM Backup to safeguard your Exchange environment, and Progent's Azure hybrid cloud integration experts can help you to utilize your Azure Block Blob storage service with Altaro to back up your virtual machines.

Progent's business continuity planning experts can help your business to use Altaro's replication features and offsite backup capability to protect your mission-critical data and enable you to resume your vital services rapidly in case of a calamity.

Periodic verification, testing, and optimization of data restoration are critical and often overlooked requirements for effective disaster readiness. In the event of a disaster such as a ransomware attack, these restoration drills can spell the difference between a temporary period of downtime and a life-or-death crisis to a business. Progent's Altaro VM Backup experts can assist you to design a program for periodically verifying, testing, and improving your recovery procedures so you can keep your backup solution up to date and contain the damage of a disastrous event.

Progent's GIAC-certified information assurance (IA) consultants can gauge the security profile of your data protection solution and can assist your organization to implement the latest technology and adhere to industry best practices for operating securely in today's threat landscape.

Zero-Downtime Solutions Provided by Progent
Progent's Microsoft and Cisco-certified consulting experts can help your company to implement an efficient, fault-tolerant environment that resolves major issues encompassing a wide array of networking technologies and processes including:

Disaster Recovery Planning
Progent's disaster recovery consultants can help you design a workplace recovery strategy so you can restore network functionality in the event of an information system catastrophe. Progent can assist you to define a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy that includes periodic disaster recovery assessments and drills. Progent's Microsoft and Cisco-certified consultants can also help you create an affordable, high-availability system architecture that addresses availability issues involving a wide range of infrastructure technologies and processes. To learn more, go to Workplace Recovery Consulting.

CRISC-Premier IT Risk Management
The Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC) certification program was established by ISACA in 2010 to verify a consultant's skills to design, deploy, and support information system controls to mitigate network risk. Progent can provide the services of a CRISC-certified consultant to assist your company to create and execute a business continuity or disaster recovery strategy based on industry best practices identified by CRISC and crafted to match your company's risk appetite, business objectives, and budgetary guidelines. For details, visit CRISC-Premier network risk control specialists.

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 High Availability Failover Clustering
Microsoft Windows Server 2019 incorporated important enhancements in capacity, throughput, management, security and compliance, app compatibility, Linux support, Kubernetes technology, and hybrid integration of local and cloud-hosted resources. Headline new features of Microsoft Windows Server 2019 include Windows Admin Center for unifying the management and monitoring of hybrid on-premises/cloud resources, System Insights for taking advantage of modern predictive analytics to control on-premises environments, Windows Defender ATP Exploit Guard for host-intrusion defense, container orchestration with Kubernetes, Cluster Sets for building and administering large non-stop scale-out clusters, and Storage Migration Service for simplifying the migration from legacy editions of Windows Server. To learn more, see Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Fault-tolerant Failover Clustering Support.

Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Disaster Recovery
Progent's Windows Server 2016 disaster recovery experts can assist you to plan and deploy a DR system based on Microsoft's latest Failover Clustering technologies including Cluster Operating System Rolling Upgrade for non-intrusive migration to Windows Server 2016, Storage Replica for crash-consistent Recovery Point Objective (RPO), Storage Spaces Direct for high-performance network-attached storage using low-cost hardware, Virtual Machine Load Balancing for improving the performance and fault-tolerance of Failover Clusters while reducing TCO and management overhead, and Cloud Witness for fast, economical deployment of a failover cluster quorum arbitration point. To read more, see Microsoft Server 2016 Disaster Recovery Support.

VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Disaster Recovery Solutions
VMware's Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a component of VMware vCenter that allows you to orchestrate, automate and verify a repeatable process for restoring applications and services quickly following a breakdown. Site Recovery Manager provides centrally managed and automated disaster recovery, application mobility, and non-intrusive site relocation, failback and re-protect. Site Recovery Manager also supports non-disruptive testing for disaster recovery, updates and patches and can produce reports to confirm full service recovery, validate SLAs and prove disaster recovery compliance. Progent offers the support of a VCDX certified VMware SRM consultant to assist you to design, configure, test and manage a DR solution powered by VMware SRM.

NetApp MetroCluster Disaster Recovery Software
NetApp MetroCluster is a high-availability and disaster recovery platform that combines failover storage clustering along with synchronous replication to deliver fast, zero RPO disaster recovery (DR) between sites located as far as 185 miles apart. Progent can provide online or on-premises access to a certified NetApp MetroCluster consultant who can help your business to plan, deploy, administer, upgrade, test and troubleshoot a disaster recovery solution based on NetApp MetroCluster. Progent can assist you to select an architecture for your MetroCluster deployment that aligns with your functional requirements and budget. Progent can make sure you follow best practices for configuring your MetroCluster solution by providing help with tasks such as assigning shelf IDs, arranging aggregate and plexes layout, setting up NetApp FlexVol volumes, setting up NetApp Snapshot, installing switches, designing a tiebreaker, setting up a TCP/IP configuration replication network between your storage clusters, and testing your MetroCluster DR solution to prove compliance with industry standards and regulatory mandates.

Fault Tolerant Load Balancing
Progent offers high availability load balancing support that addresses network load balancing, load balanced applications, network infrastructure routing, and content dispatching products including F5 Networks 3DNS. Fault tolerant load balancing technologies for which Progent offers consulting expertise include Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008 Network Load Balancing Manager, Citrix Metaframe and Presentation Server, Cisco Content Services Switch, Cisco Distributed Director and Cisco CDN Software, and F5 Networks 3-DNS. To read more, see Non-stop Load Balancing.

Zero Downtime Colocation
Progent's Data Center professionals can help you find zero-downtime data centers that meet the specific requirements of your business. High availability co-location sites are particularly attractive to small and mid-size businesses because of their low cost and simplified logistics compared to pursuing a do-it-yourself approach. Attempting to design an on-site data center that offers even a basic degree of fault tolerance is too expensive for typical small organizations. Progent is ready to show you how to reap all the advantages of non-stop colocation centers by offering a full array of engineering and maintenance services. To learn more, visit High-Availability Data Centers Consulting.

24x7 Branch Office Networking
Progent's interoffice connection engineers can help companies create fault tolerant inter-site connectivity by means of redundant networks with transparent failover. Progent's Cisco-certified CCIE engineers can plan and deploy fault-tolerant Inter-office connections supported by non-stop EIGRP network routers or non-stop OSPF deployment of Cisco routers. Progent can show you how multi-path connections and automatic fail-over can provide affordable 24x7 interoffice connectivity. To find out more, go to Non-stop Interoffice Networking.

Non-stop Internet Access
Progent's Cisco-authorized IT professionals can show you how to create an affordable, fault tolerant Internet configuration architecture that can deliver non-stop Internet connectivity via a wide range of high availability Internet access solutions including non-stop BGP, automatic fail-over, and multiple ISPs. Progent can provide Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert engineers to help you apply the most advanced techniques for high availability Internet connectivity to build an economical, completely redundant Internet interface with automatic failover and other features to create fault tolerant Internet connections. To learn more, visit 24x7 Internet Access Architecture.

Backup and Recovery Solutions Consulting Services
Progent offers economical remote access to consultants skilled in a wide range of utilities and technologies that provide solutions for protecting Windows, Mac, and Linux servers and desktops as well as notebooks and handhelds. Progent offers help for all major data protection platforms such as Acronis, Backup Exec, BackupAssist, CrashPlan, Double-Take Software, MozyPro, Retrospect for Macintosh, Time Machine, VMware Data Recovery, and Oracle Solaris FLARs. Progent can assist you to design, enhance, or troubleshoot backup/restore systems for a range of environments including on-premises, remote, cloud-based, or a mix. For more information, go to Backup and Restore Solutions Consulting.

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) Backup and Recovery Consulting and Support Services
Progent's certified Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager support professionals can assist your company to create an effective workplace recovery strategy, design a cost-effective high-availability IT infrastructure, install a Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager-powered backup and restore system, comprehensively validate your DPM system, train your administrative personnel or regular consultants how to manage SCDPM, or provide extensive information technology outsourcing such as remote housing of SCDPM machines in Progent's world-class data center. For details, visit System Center Data Protection Manager Expertise.

Barracuda Backup Cloud and Offsite Data Backup and Disaster Recovery
Barracuda Backup is a low-cost, subscription backup/restore service for small and mid-size businesses. A Barracuda Backup solution can include a custom-designed hardware appliance built by Barracuda or a virtual appliance with comparable features but which utilizes your own storage hardware. Barracuda Backup protects vital company data generated locally, at one or more remote sites, or in the cloud. For disaster recovery, 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 Barracuda partner and Progent's Barracuda Backup consultants can provide a broad range of consulting services to assist your business to plan, configure, operate and repair a BDR system built on Barracuda technology. For more information, see Barracuda Backup and disaster recovery consultants.

ProSight DPS 365 Total Backup Services for Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 offers rudimentary archiving but does not have native support for key data protection capabilities like Exchange Online backups or long-term point-in-time data recovery for OneDrive or SharePoint Online. Hornetsecurity's 365 Total Backup provides a full-featured platform for automatic backup and quick recovery of all your company's M365 mail, Teams Chats, SharePoint documents, OneDrive data, and content on Windows desktops and laptops. Progent is a certified Hornetsecurity/Altaro partner and offers ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) 365 Total Backup to deliver comprehensive management services for Hornetsecurity's 365 Total Backup product. ProSight Data Protection Services 365 Total Backup provides an affordable backup-as-a-service alternative that protects M365 components against data loss or corruption caused by user or software mistakes, malevolent deletion, and cyber assaults like ransomware. To read more, visit ProSight Data Protection Services 365 Total Backup services for Microsoft 365.

Managed Cloud Backup: ProSight Data Protection Services ECHO
ProSight Data Protection Services ECHO provide small and medium-sized organizations a low cost and fully managed service for secure backup/disaster recovery. Available at a fixed monthly cost, ProSight DPS ECHO automates your backup activities and enable rapid recovery of critical data, apps and virtual machines that have become lost or corrupted due to hardware failures, software glitches, natural disasters, human mistakes, or malware attacks like ransomware. ProSight Data Protection Services ECHO can help you protect, retrieve and restore files, folders, applications, system images, plus Hyper-V and VMware virtual machine images. Critical data can be protected on the cloud, to an on-promises storage device, or to both. Progent's BDR specialists can deliver world-class support to configure ProSight DPS ECHO to be compliant with regulatory requirements like HIPAA, FIRPA, PCI and Safe Harbor and, whenever necessary, can assist you to recover your business-critical data. Find out more about ProSight DPS ECHO managed backup and recovery.

ProSight DPS 360 Backup Services
Progent's data protection experts can help you to design, implement and debug a backup plan based on MSP360 software. MSP360 enables file/folder or image-based backup/restore for VMs and physical machines, works with all popular public clouds, and permits businesses to create a backup ecosystem with a minimum RTO and a granular RPO. With ProSight Data Protection Services 360 Backup, Progent can provide comprehensive monitoring and remote management of your backup environment to prevent data loss resulting from user mistakes, computer errors, ill-intentioned insiders, and malware assaults like ransomware. To learn more, go to ProSight DPS 360 Backup solutions.

Consulting for Double-Take Software for Backup/Restore
Double-Take offers a family of tools designed to provide small companies a range of cost-effective alternatives for backing up and recovering vital applications such as Exchange Server, SQL Server, Blackberry, and Microsoft Office SharePoint. Progent's disaster recovery planning consultants have extensive backgrounds incorporating Double-Take technology into small company information systems to create an advanced state of fault tolerance and disaster recovery readiness at a budget-friendly cost. For details, go to Consulting Services Double-Take Software for Data Backup.

Why Pick Progent for Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Planning Solutions?
Because Progent is a Microsoft Partner and offers high-level application consulting for a broad variety of small business applications, Progent can assist clients to arrive at comprehensive information technology solutions that substantially enhance the productivity of your information system. As a Registered Partner with Cisco, Progent can provide the support of certified engineers and specialists with expertise in architecting, installing and supporting networking solutions built on Cisco technology. The depth of Progent's technical know-how and Progent's sensitivity to the needs of small and midsize businesses make Progent the perfect partner for building and maintaining a cost-effective, high-availability network.

How You Can Contact Progent's Consultants for Business Continuity Planning Help
In order to get in touch with Progent about technical help for disaster recovery planning, call 1-800-993-9400 or see Contact Progent.