WinSCP Support

It has been brought to our attention that the newest version of WinSCP does not seem to play nice with our SCP transfer method for restoring SQL or BMR backups. For the time being we are asking that customers make use of an older build while we attempt to figure out what change has occured that has caused the inconsistency. I've included a build of WinSCP portable at the location below that should suit your needs. This version has been tested in our environment here and has been found to work properly. You can find information conducting an SCP restore in this article here in the transfer portion of the article.

FTP information to download WinSCP portable:
ftp://remote.boxicom.com


User: 3xdownload
Password: Trusted_down

The build is located in the 'WinSCP' folder at that location.

Trustyd acquires 3X Systems

As you may have gathered from the press release, 3X Systems has changed ownership and is now Trustyd selling the 3X Systems product line. What this means is that any of our units that are out in the wild will continue to be supported, will continue to function with our cloud based locator service, and you’ll still be dealing with the same personnel at our Global Headquarters in Dublin, Ohio.

The change in ownership has caused a redoubling on efforts to improve our partner program as well as efforts to promote both the product line, and the core tenets of backup and recovery. For partners and their customers this means more engagement and concerted effort to proactively solve potential technical and commercial obstacles. Educating partners and end users on the most effective ways to protect important data is as always a high priority.

Perhaps most importantly, the technology remains the same for now. Your backups will continue to operate in the same manner, and this commercial change will not affect your software or configuration in any way. Over time you can look forward to a more effective release cycle and continued effort to bring greater functionality and reliability to the 3X Systems Remote Backup Appliance you know and trust. The support team remains onboard and ready to respond to your questions and concerns.

If you have inquiries about the Trustyd acquisition of 3X Systems please feel free to shoot an email to sales@trustyd.com (for commercial questions) or support@trustyd.com (technical questions). Information on the press release specifically can be found here. 

The Cloud Unraveled

On October 17th (Wednesday) at 10:30 AM (EST) we will be hosting a webinar called 'The Cloud Unraveled.' The objective of the talk is going to be to discuss what the 'cloud' is and how it relates to small to medium sized enterprises. Some of the talking points we'll be covering include:

• Public Cloud v. Private Cloud v. Hybrid Solutions
• Data Ownership (Users v. Owners)
• Services v. Infrastructure
• Business Implications
• Administrative costs
• Availability (data)
• Impact on users

There will be a short presentation given by Ryan Koch (@Ryan_Koch) followed by a question an answer session for those with inquiries or comments. If you're interested in attending go here to register for the event.

Disk Image vs File backups: The Pros and Cons

There are all sorts of backup set types to choose from, and at times it can become a bit unclear what choices are best for your strategy. I'd like to walk you through a comparison of images and file level backups in particular. The question of which to use when is an important one, as the choice will have a cost both in time, resources and man hours. An effective strategy is important to making the most out of a 3X Remote Backup Appliance.

Disk Image backups

Pros:

• OS and Applications backed up intact
• Entire system restore speed

Cons:

• Performance of backup set
• Storage space requirements
• Resource requirements (network and system I/O)

The primary points in favor of Disk Image backups are the fact that the OS and applications installed on the device are intact upon backup and restore, and the speed in which an entire system can be brought backup. The trade off for these benefits however is a backup set with large storage requirements, as well as possible I/O saturation (be it network or disk). It is best to use this backup set type for especially critical servers such as a domain controller, or an email server. More or less the infrastructure that your business would absolutely *need* to operate. Another use for this style of backup is with Virtual Machines that are on non Hyper-V hosts.

File backups

Pros:

• Backup performance and storage (de-duplication)
• Simplicity of set up (less administrative involvement)
• Reliability

Cons:

• Full system restore requires OS install and application install

File backup sets have the advantage of being simple to set up, as a rule set with a destination is all you need to define the target. File backup sets also take advantage of de-duplication, and is significantly cheaper in time and resources than disk imaging in most cases. File backup sets also allow for the restoration of specific files in instances where you don't need the whole system restored.

The conclusion to draw here is that you need to tailor your choices based on the type of infrastructure you are backing up. For particularly critical servers and systems using both of these is a good idea, but for most cases simply having a file backup set is ideal. 

Backing up Microsoft SQL

As advertised the 3X Appliance is capable of backing up Microsoft SQL databases. In fact, as of version 3.1.26 the product is even able to handle Microsoft SQL clusters. Due to the demand for backing up this platform we get a lot of questions about how to configure the backups for SQL, and how to configure SQL to play well with our product.

First things first, we need to list out what is needed to have a successful backed up SQL environment:

1. SQL Server Instance

2. SQL Management Studio

3. 3X Appliance

Next lets talk about how your SQL instance should be configured. The first requirement is that the SQL Server Browser service is enabled, started, and set to automatic. The service is question is shown in the following screen shot:

After you've made sure that requirement is met you will then want to make sure you have SQL authentication enabled on your instance, as well as an account set up. The easiest way to do this is through the use of SQL Server Management Studio. In SQL Server Management Studio you'll want to go into the properties of your SQL instance and to 'Security'. There you'll want to select 'SQL Server and Windows Authentication mode'. Screen shot below:

You also need to make sure you have a SQL account that you can use. In the example here it's the sa account due to it being in a test environment. In production it is suggested that you create a new account and assign it access to the databases you are backing up.

Lastly you'll want to make sure that TCP/IP is enabled as the communication protocol. This you'll find under the SQL Server Configuration Manager. If you are running a cluster you'll find the network settings under 'features' and the cluster configuration manager.

Once you have made sure that the above is complete you are then ready to run SQL backups with the 3X Appliance. In your 3X Manager you just need to set up a SQL backup set and proceed through the wizard. Remember when prompted for authentication you will be making use of the SQL account and not a Windows authentication account.

For information on SQL Restores check out this article: http://itrkoch.blogspot.com/2012/05/quick-microsoft-sql-restore-how-to.html

Backup 101

We had our first web cast today at 11am eastern time. We had a nice turn out and would like to thank all of those who managed to attend. You can find a recording of the broadcast below. The session covered an overview of backup essentials that are critical to any proper backup strategy.

The 3X Appliance and your business continuity plan

If you're planning for disaster look no further. The 3X Appliance can effectively backup your infrastructure, and assist you in returning it to an operational status quickly and easily. But you may be wondering how exactly it can be used to achieve these ends. The 3X Appliance allows you to take file level, image level, and application level (databases, email, etc) backups off site and with minimal administration cost. One of our associates has written a short walk through of some disaster recovery planning at the following blog post, which you may find helpful as well.

As an example lets consider an organization consisting of a few servers to support both internal and external services, and a series of desktops that their associates use to conduct business. In this scenario you are going to touch mutiple scopes of data back up, and will need all of them in order to assure your data is accessible in a reasonable amount of time, and stored reliably.

To achieve our goals we'll need an effective strategy. For an infrastructure similar to what we've described above it is suggested to first start off by taking a backup of your infrastructure on site in order to get one solid full copy efficiently. You'll want to create backup sets that conduct file system back ups, a single image backup (Bare metal recovery (BMR) backup), and any application services you support (Microsoft SQL and Exchange). Once that is complete you can move the vault offsite. The deduplication and compression technology used by the appliance will keep your backups as small as possible, and transmit them as quickly as possible. You can read a bit more about this on our website.

Once off site all you have to do is set up a port forwarding rule that points the management and data ports to your appliance and the locator service takes care of the rest. Your clients will get a broadcast of the new vault network location and communication will resume. Your file system and service/application backups will continue without any further configuration changes. Here it is suggested that you set your original BMR backup to 'never run' and 'keep forever'. Optionally you can set up a backup set that runs a BMR backup to a local spot only giving you the ability to access an up to date image quickly.

If a disaster strikes and you have this running on a nice rhythm you will be very well prepared. You can run restores directly from your off site location, or you can move the vault to where you have set up shop again and begin moving the data back into your environment. You'll have a base image you can deploy for each machine, the files the users/servers were making use of, as well as object level data  for each application service you had running. The time taken to get back online has been reduced from days to mere hours potentially saving a bundle in business costs.

The advantage to using an appliance like the ones we make at 3X Systems is that you have the data from your entire infrastructure preserved in your own private cloud. Your backups can then occur easily and without having to manage multiple hardware and software architectures, thus saving you on administrative costs. The restores can occur in kind getting you back on your feet as quickly as possible. Instead of having to worry about where your data is, you can go back to worrying about getting your people and your business back in position.

Four neat things you might not realize your 3X Appliance can do

The 3X Appliance is a very useful backup appliance. So useful in fact that there are some things that you can do with it that many of our customers may not be aware of yet. So here are four things you might not be aware that your 3X Appliance can do.

1. Backup Hyper-V hosts.
It turns out that you can take VM level backups of your Hyper-V infrastructure. You can do this by installing the 3X Agent on your Hyper-V box and taking VSS file level backups of the *.VHDs. An excellent backup strategy can be formed by combining this with more granular backups at the guest level. This blog article goes into a little more detail on how to set this up. You can also backup the shared storage of Hyper-V clusters as long as the host you install the agent on has a mounted drive letter for the shared volume, or a hard link to it.

2. Backup Microsoft SQL Failover clusters.
As of version 3.1.25 we fixed the manner in which our Agent communicates with SQL instances to allow customers to backup SQL failover clusters. An explanation of our test environment which you can read here provides some more details on fail over clusters and their composition.

3. Backup SMB (Samba) shares.
SMB shares can be set up on multiple Operating Systems including Windows, Mac, and Linux and allow for your users to access a shared file system. Using this our customers can backup shared resources, as well as get around the lack of an existing Linux agent in our current version. This is done using the 'Network File system' as your backup set type. One experimental use of this on linux is to backup ESX servers by taking a snapshot and then backing up the vmdk files, and then removing the snapshots once the job is complete.

4. SCP Restores for Microsoft SQL BAK files.
Using the Web Manager UI you can initiate SCP sessions in order to download your BAK files directly from the vault. This is particularly useful in the event that your SQL box has gone down, you've brought another one up and you don't have time to wait for a Client Profile Recovery. You can check out how to d o this by taking a look at this blog article that covers Microsoft SQL Restores.

There you have it. Four things your 3X Appliance does that you might not have been aware of. If there are any neat things you have gotten yours to do please feel free to share in the comments. If you have any questions on any of these or other features of the 3X Appliance feel free to shoot me an email.

3X gains a global partner

We've gained a new international partner in our efforts to bring the private cloud to consumers all over the world. Tech by Design Pty Ltd has agreed to become our exclusive manufacturing and distributing partner for the Australasian region (Australia and Asia). They will have the ability to produce and distribute the full range of 3X appliances and the operation will be based out of Caloundra, Queensland in Australia.

 The new partnership will bring a great market opportunity for us here at 3X Systems and will allow us to bring an excellent scalable private cloud offering to the region. The Australasian area is experiencing tremendous economic growth despite difficult times, and this growth will continue to prompt greater information technology investment. The market is ripe and ready for a true quality private cloud offering for small to medium sized businesses there, and 3X will most certainly deliver it. Check out the official release here.