Backups are back and bigger than ever

Over the past week we have been working very hard at expanding our storage network capacity. The demand for our new off-site backup system has been far greater than we ever imagined so we had to grow our network significantly to accomodate all of our partners that wanted to deploy this service for their customers. Who can blame them, we use the same system to backup all of the servers we manage as well.

So what’s new? Additional network capacity and additional storage. Newer version of AhSay. Improved replication system. The amount of work that went into putting this together was significant, we have dedicated over 5 days to it.

How does it work?

Each client (workstation or server) installs a small branded agent on the PC that is being backed up. The agent runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Novell. The agent backs data up to the server on the byte level, this way only changes within the file are propagated instead of the entire file each time there is a change. The client keeps the information on the backup schedule and retention policies (how long a file should be available for restore) and is capable of backing up Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange (both on store level and optionally mailbox brick level down to the message or folder), Volume Shadow Copy, Oracle, MySQL, etc.

The infrastructure, frankly, is impressive. The main AhSay OBS server runs on the perimeter of our Dallas/InfoMart network and receives/sends data from the client agent. The entire server is backed up daily to a local SAN for quick disaster recovery purposes (in case of RAID failure). The entire server is also replicated in realtime to a geographically redundant data center in Chicago/CBOT using AhSay replication server. We know how important your data is so we do our best to protect it as best as we can, 3–way replication with 2 of them in sync at all times.

We’d like to thank our customers for their patience during this process. If you were on trial and experienced any issues please contact us and we will extend your backup trial by additional 30 days.