Recently, we have had several interviews with partners about checking and monitoring backups in BackupAgent. We have improved the experience in version 4 and provided some alternative routes for integrating monitoring activities. Partners have indicated that monitoring can be time-consuming depending on the type of SLA they provide to their customers. Some of them took our advice and implemented alternative ways to logging in to the management console.

Recently we’ve added another Parallels product to our portfolio of standard billing and provisioning products for hosters and service providers to bill and provision BackupAgent online backup services to customers. In the following screenshot you can get an impression of how this works in PBA-S:

Last September we were on the road with our technology partner Parallels. In several EMEA cities we promoted our backup service integration module for the Parallels Automation platform. On the road show in Amsterdam, Roland met the WHIR tv film crew and they were very interested in the this module.

The speed of a hard disk can be quite deceptive. At first, when the drive is clean and there no applications writing data to it at all, it seems to be quite fast. But after a while, when the drives fill up (i.e. more backups are running simultaneously) the whole system performance slowly degrades. It is then quite easy to overlook the storage system as a cause for this.

Here is an example of what happens with the performance, as data fills up the drive:

Last week one of our partners was in urgent need of support since one of his clients was recovering from an apocalyptic disaster. Because of the nature of business it was crystal clear that the customer would go bankrupt if critical data could not be recovered. We had to make sure all data was restored in a consistent state.

In my twelve years of experience as a system administrator I faced the challenge of restoring MS Exchange Servers several times during my professional career. Although the Online Backup Client in combination with the recovery tool from BackupAgent makes it relatively easy, the restore of an Exchange environment is, and will always be a difficult task.