ANY DEVICE

A commercial making the rounds right now, where a groom is getting ready for his wedding and, rather than offering him the typical well wishes, people tell him, “You’re going to lose it all today.” He hears this from his father, his best man, and even the limo driver. You begin to wonder what they mean as the look of trepidation on the groom’s face begins to grow. The tagline bears the message that data loss occurs without warning; you never know when or where it may happen. This is absolutely true but, like other disasters, including natural disasters like hurricanes, floods or fires, there are ways you can be prepared for data loss caused by hard drive failure or…

As VMware grows in popularity, so do replication processes and applications. Like a RAID server that relies on redundancy, replicating the data on your virtual machine is one form of on-site back-up. The ease with which you can replicate data from one virtual machine to another, creating an easy-to-access back-up, makes virtual machines more secure and less susceptible to the need for emergency data recovery.  However, to get the most out of your virtual server, you’ll want to follow virtual machine replication best practices. 1- Make sure a dedicated network connects your production and disaster recovery site so that you can access your data in the event of virtual machine failure and data recovery emergency.  2 – Make sure replication…

As the costs of RAID drives drop even lower and storage capacities for hard disk drives exceed 1 TB, more and more small businesses and home users are incorporating RAID arrays into their data storage methods. RAID arrays can be used as home media servers, to expand storage capabilities across a home or a small business network, and to boost performance while enhancing the security of data stored on the server. The top choice for many home and professional users is a RAID 5 array, which typically employs a controller for even better performance. While most RAID levels provide either greater storage capacity, or enhanced security and better performance, a RAID 5 array offers greater storage capacity with storage striped…

If you’re a business owner faced with data loss, your first instinct might be to panic. If your IT staff fails at their attempts to retrieve lost data, you may call a data recovery service to help. But it’s important to stop, take a breath, and consider data recovery in the same light as any other investment you make in your business. If you’re running a business that relies on 24-7 computer operations, such as an online e-commerce website, every second counts. Don’t attempt do-it-yourself data recovery, even with a well-trained IT staff. Not only does this waste time,  it could result in rendering your mission critical data irretrievable. If you’re a business owner using your computers internally, and your…

Approximately 85 percent or higher of the data recovery cases we see here at 24 Hour Data are due to user error. The national statistics say about 87 % of all data loss is caused by user error, so our customers are no different in that regard than the rest of the population. (Of course, we like to believe they’re a lot smarter for choosing 24 Hour Data as their data recovery service!) How can you become even smarter, still, and avoid accidentally deleting, damaging or corrupting the important files that store your critical data? Here are a few tips. 1 – Password protect your computer, phone, MacBook, iPad or tablet PC. – A simple-to-remember but difficult (for others) to…

A RAID array can offer a boost in performance, an enhancement in storage capacity or greater data stability through redundancy, at a lower cost than using separate drives. Depending on which level of RAID array you choose, you’ll either get enhanced performanced and redundancy or enhanced storage capacity, but a few levels, including RAID 4 and RAID 5, offer benefits in all aspects. RAID 4 and RAID 5 arrays achieve better stability and security of data through a process called parity. Parity is sometimes confused with the mirroring that takes place in a RAID 1 array, where the contents of the drive are duplicated on a second drive. In a RAID 1 array, if one drive fails the array can…

NexGen Storage, a Louisville, Colo. company, recently introuced a new virtual machine storage system that combines the benefits of solid state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) and makes it easier to set up storage for virtualized servers for organizations running mission-critical applications. The NexGen n5 Storage Systems http://searchvirtualstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240110388/NexGen-emerge… apply granular Quality of Service (QoS) levels to let users provision performance the same way they provision capacity. It does this by partitioning storage in blocks across three tiers: RAM, PCIe SSDs, and hard disks. Users can provision 30,000 IOPS for mission-critical apps, 25,000 IOPS to business critical apps, and a slower 5,000 IOPS to non-critical apps. As NexGen VP of Marketing Chris McCall explains, “We are saying, ‘Just tell us how…

If we had to pinpoint two of  biggest trends for 2011, which we expect to continue and expand in 2012, it would be virtualization and cloud storage.  If you’re new to the IT world, or are responsible for managing an IT staff but don’t know much about it yourself, the two terms may confuse you. Some people mistakenly use the words interchangably, but they’re not the same thing at all. Defining Cloud Storage Cloud storage is simply storage “in the cloud,” or via the Internet. When you put your data in the cloud, though, it still resides on a server somewhere. Cloud storage is considered one of the safest forms of data storage, since your data is protected off-site, housed…

Here at 24 Hour Data, we like to advocate three forms of data back-up to avoid the need for emergency data recovery. Now, new vStorage APIs for Data Protection from VMware have made it even easier to back up your data from your VMware virtual machines running vSphere. These new APIs let you perform full, differential and incremental image back-up and restore functions on virtual machines using Windows and Linux OS across multiple vSphere hosts or virtual machines without requiring separate agents in each environment. vStorage APIs make back up faster, easier, and more cost-effective with a centralized backup solution. You can reduce your dependency on back up windows and run back-ups with virtually no downtime. You can even run back-ups while…