Drive Copy 10 Giveaway

MakeUseOf.com is giving away 100 licenses of Drive Copy 10 Personal. Drive Copy is a great utility for upgrading hard drives, creating a single image of your computer for recovery if the PC crashes, and many others. If you would like to grab a free copy, head over to MakeUseOf.com and read the post.

Added Bonus:

They are giving away our personal version that will not work on servers.

If you would like a chance to win a copy of Drive Copy 10 Server, Go HERE.

Best Practices on Virtual Server Backup Strategy – White Paper

Are you looking for the best practices in implementing and maintaining a virtual server environment?

Download the latest white paper explaining the best practices in virtual server implementation and maintenance.

IT systems have become such an integral part of the business process that down-time must be avoided at all costs. Those responsible for enterprise systems, both large and small are asking tough questions when it comes to business continuity and disaster recovery, questions such as:

• How can we keep down time to a minimum?
• How can I future proof my business continuity solutions?
• What new technologies deliver improved 24×7 access?
• How can I demonstrate the Return on Investment (ROI) of a disaster recovery solution?
• Is there a way to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with new technologies?
• How can I build synergy into a backup solution that delivers future value?
• How can I avoid dead-end technologies?
• What criteria should I use to select and integrate recovery products?

Simply put, businesses large and small needing to maintain 24×7 access to IT resources are looking for a better way to deliver 24×7 access, prevent disasters and recover quickly from unpreventable events, all without breaking the bank and still maintain scalability with products that are future proofed.

Adaptive Restore Week

About two weeks ago I had a computer crash. Not just a bad virus or other corruption but my PC gave me the dreaded blue screen of death and nothing I seemed to do was going to bring my PC back from the dead. I had a recent backup image of my computer. I was using Drive Backup scheduled for an image on a weekly basis but that alone wasn’t going to help since I was going to need a completely new computer to replace the one that was fried. Granted it was time to buy a new computer, the one that died was on it’s last leg and was over 3 years old.

I ordered a new PC online and when it was delivered I wanted all of my old data to be on the new machine. I was sure that our product had functionality to do this but wasn’t exactly sure how it worked or how difficult it would be since I was now using a completely new set of hardware. I asked my favorite Tech Support rep how hard it would be to restore my computer on the new hardware and he just about  laughed at me. He explained that with Paragons Adaptive Restore, I could restore my backup image onto ANY computer and it would be just as easy as running a regular restore with one minor adjustment. Adaptive Restore would do the rest automatically.

What does Adaptive Restore do?

Here is the explanation of what Adaptive Restore does given on our website.

• Change of the Windows kernel settings according to the new configuration. We detect the given hardware profile and automatically install the appropriate Windows HAL and kernel.
• Installation of drivers for boot critical devices. We detect those without drivers and automatically try to install lacking drivers from the built-in Windows repository. If there’s no driver in the repository, we prompt the user to set a path to an additional driver repository, strongly recommending not to proceed until all drivers for the found boot critical devices are installed. In case drivers for these devices are installed, but disabled, they will be enabled.
• Installation of drivers for a PS/2 mouse and keyboard. This action will only be accomplished for Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003.
• Installation of drivers for network cards. We detect those without drivers and automatically try to install lacking drivers from the built-in Windows repository. If there’s no driver in the repository, we prompt the user to set a path to an additional driver repository.

Announcing Adaptive Restore Week

Because of this personal success with Adaptive Restore I wanted to dedicate this as Adaptive Restore week. I figure if an application works this well, we should have a company holiday dedicated to it and share it with all of our readers. I can’t imagine spending time using a backup product that doesn’t include the functionality of restoring to a new machine out of the box. Drive Backup and Paragon’s Backup and Recovery Suite are the only applications on the market that include Adaptive Restore for free. The truth is that you don’t even need to pay for our backup software and can use Adaptive Restore for the price of a dinner out.

In appreciation of Adaptive Restore Week we are offering customers some great deals on our products.

Get Backup and Recovery for Free and buy the Adaptive Restore tool for $14.95

Get the complete Backup and Recovery Suite for 30% off

If you are looking for something in your business environment we have excellent business class backup solutions that you can get at a discount also.

Drive Backup 10 Server 30% off

Drive Backup 10 Workstation 30% off

* Corporate products and discount sold through an authorized Paragon Partner. Contact a reseller or us directly.

Storage Virtualization Helps Alleviate Virtual Server Bottlenecks

Storage virtualization is the new focus for many IT Mangers and CIOs. Paragon Software for the most part has been known for server optimization and disaster recovery in both physical and virtual environments. Our latest technologies have given us an edge in virtualization that none of our competitors have been able to replicate. The unique ability to connect to virtual machines that are dormant allows technicians to access virtual machines in ways never before possible.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Enterprise Storage Forum and got to speak about the virtualization market and what we see happening.

Compounding the mismatch between server virtualization and storage resources is a tough economy that has brought increased pressure to maximize virtual infrastructures by increasing virtual machine density. This increased density puts additional pressure on an already strained storage infrastructure.

“IT managers are being forced to do more with their existing infrastructures with less resources being made available, and this is forcing them to look for new ways to reallocate free space on their storage to save on hardware,” said Koka Sexton, manager of business development at Paragon Software. “IT managers are learning how to analyze their virtual infrastructures more closely and implement projects of migrating data to lower-performing drives to free resources.”

Some of the key factors in choosing a storage system for a virtual environment, according to Sexton, include ensuring that storage customers possess a complete understanding of the virtual platform that they are planning to implement and that they are sure that the system can scale to meet their needs.

“In general, the more VMs you have on a host, the more NICs you’ll want,” said Sexton. “However, the network workload of these VMs is the biggest influence. For example, if VMs have light workloads, you’ll need fewer NICs; if VMs have heavier workloads, you’ll need more NICs. As a rule, you’ll probably experience other resource bottlenecks before the network becomes an issue on virtual hosts.”

There are many aspects to consider when using virtualization one of the primary things to consider is the ability to scale and use a tool that can be virtual environment independent.

What are the major concerns you have about virtualization?