Capacity Planning for the Cloud

Joshua Hoffman, lead geek at AppAssure Software, recently highlighted a really interesting podcast. The podcast, hosted by Dana Gardner of E-Commerce Times, discusses the changing approach to capacity planning that has begun to develop as a result of cloud computing’s rising star.

Joining Dana in the conversation is Neil Ashizawa, manager of HP's Software as a Service (SaaS) Products and Cloud Solutions. Dana and Neil discuss the fact that, as a result of the ability of cloud computing environments to be elastic – that is, to expand and contract themselves based on need and demand – the way that we, as IT professionals, plan those environments needs to change.

Neil put it the following way:

Old-fashioned capacity planning focuses on the peak usage of the application, and it had to, because when you were deploying applications in-house, you had to take into consideration that peak usage case. At the end of the day, you had to be provisioned correctly with respect to compute power. Oftentimes with long procurement cycles, you'd have to plan for that.

In the cloud, because you have this idea of elasticity, where you can scale up your compute resources when you need them, and scale them back down, obviously that adds another dimension to old-school capacity planning.

This obviously has some wide-reaching implications on virtually every aspect of IT infrastructure planning (including how we plan for demand on our Exchange servers, web servers, SQL servers and so on.) And needless to say, our adoption of virtualization technology has a substantial impact as well.

For more information on all of the AppAssure Software Products, Please click on the url below:

http://www.flexnet.com/Appassure/Appimage.htm

Replay 4 - The Next Generation Backup and Recovery Software form AppAssure Software

AppAssure Software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Replay 4 – the next generation backup and recovery platform from AppAssure Software. Frankly we think this is the best server backup software!

• This latest release of Replay enables you to:
  Reduce hardware and storage costs with cloud backups, leveraging powerful new virtualization, compression, replication and de-duplication technology.


• Implement a fault tolerant datacenter in the cloud for less than 10% the cost of traditional hardware-based solutions.


• Make day-to-day management of your environment easier with a centralized enterprise console for managing distributed infrastructures including remote offices.
  

The existing suite of Replay products, including Replay for Windows, Replay for Exchange, and Replay for SQL have all been updated to include the benefits of the new Replay 4 platform. We're also excited to announce the addition of the following four brand new products as well:

Replay for Small Business Server is an application-aware, server-based disk imaging solution that automatically and continuously images your entire Windows Small Business Server and includes integrated support for Microsoft Exchange and SQL, helping small businesses recover from disasters and system failures in minutes, instead of hours or days.

Replay for Hyper-V is an enterprise-class backup and disaster recovery solution designed for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments. It supports both host and guest backup methodologies while delivering backup & recovery, advanced disaster recovery and replication capabilities all in one solution. With Replay for Hyper-V, the entire host, select volumes and individual files within virtual machines can be restored.

Replay for Windows Desktops simplifies and automates backup and restore processes, while giving an administrator the ability to remotely monitor and manage geographically distributed machines from a single console. Based on Replay's disk imaging and bare metal restore technologies, Replay for Windows Desktops gives end users the ultimate control in performing self-service recovery of files, folders, or systems, in minutes.-

Replay Replication enables a powerful cloud-based application recovery solution by allowing you to securely and efficiently ship your backup snapshots into the cloud.

To make Replay 4 even more affordable, AppAssure has taken several significant steps including:

• Unlimited mailbox protection and single message restoration for each Replay for Exchange license.-A new licensing model providing monthly subscriptions is now available


• The release of three totally free tools to make it easier for IT administrators to do their jobs:
  
• For Exchange Admins: free single message recovery for Exchange with MailRetriever Lite


• For SharePoint Admins: free document recovery for Sharepoint with DocRetriever


• For Hyper-V Admins: the first tool in our Hyper-V Toolset, VHD Mount ShellExtension
  

Existing customers can upgrade for free to Replay 4 with the purchase of Replay Replication at just $359 per server. New customers are eligible for a free external 2TB NAS storage device (certain conditions apply).

To read more about AppAssure software full suite of product, please click on the following link:http://www.flexnet.com/Appassure/Appimage.htm