Many companies are still using SAN-to-Tape Backup and Online Tech is offering an alternative, SAN-to-SAN Replication.  SAN-to-SAN replication means:

1) Lower costs of disk storage

2) Cheaper Internet connectivity costs

3) Continuous replication

Additionally, backing up directly to a Dell EqualLogic SAN at Online Tech's SAS 70 secure data center provides peace of mind that the SAN data can be restored at any time, without delay or lost data as in tape backup.

According to Online Tech's recent press release,  clients can now purchase a monthly SAN backup package that includes:

1) SAN colocation with locked rack and redundant power

2) SAS 70 data center network and physical security

3) 5 Mbps bandwidth for up to 50GB transfer/day

4) Secure VPN network connection into the SAN

To read the full press release on SAN Replication, click here.

As bandwidth keeps getting cheaper and more accessible, IT departments can reduce costs and improve recovery times without turning to expensive DR products from the likes of Sungard, IBM, or EDS.

For example, Memsic, Inc. of Andover Massachusetts, a producer of sensor technologies, needed online backup that was cost effective and Sarbanes-Oxley compliant for their disaster recovery and they chose OTVault, Online Tech's new online data storage product.  "With OTVault, our data is securely sent to SAS 70 certified data centers with redundant fail-safe systems. We found OTVault to be a cost effective option for our disaster recovery ” said Cheryl Merino, a Manager at Memsic.

Unlike other online "vaults" that require you to install special software on all your machines, OTVault maps to a drive on your servers and supports a plethora of protocols – which means you can use your current backup software by simply pointing it to OTVault as the destination.

The backup storage also eliminates the costs of tapes, hardware maintenance, offsite tape delivery and storage, and the personnel costs to manage the tape rotations.

To celebrate the launch, Online Tech is offering an OTVault trial free for 15 days.

With the announcement of OTVault, new online data storage, businesses can take an easy first step towards disaster recovery by backing up their data online to one of Online Tech's SAS 70 certified data centers.

Backups at many businesses are often poorly managed - inconsistent backup schedules or leaving the backup data on site are just some of the problems that can be overcome by automating electronic backups to online data storage.

OTVault lets businesses map the online storage to their in house servers as a drive and use their current backup software to write backups and critical data at Online Tech’s SAS70 certified data centers.

OTVault starts at $199 for 100 GB of online data storage and only $99 for each additional 100 GB.  More on OTVault Online Data Storage.

We've been long on preaching that data is as valuable as money for most businesses.  Now we're offering another way for businesses to protect their valuable data.

OTVault is our new online data storage product - an easy, cost effective solution for backing up your servers or archiving your data from any location into a secure, SAS70 certified data center. 

OTVault is not targeted at consumers, laptops, or desktop backups. The product is designed specifically for businesses that need to back up their servers or archive data to between 100 Gigabytes to 10 Terabytes of online storage.

Unlike Mozy, or other low end solutions that limit upload speeds to limit the amount of backup data which can be transferred each day, OTVault starts with over 50 Gigabytes of data transfer per day and can be upgraded to higher speeds.

And here's the cool part - the price: OTVault starts at $199 for 100 GB and $99 for each additional 100 GB, which now makes online backup a cost effective alternative to traditional tape backup.

To help you select the best Dell server for your web hosting needs check out current Dedicated Server Special page!

Servers are very reliable today. But the demand for them to work 7x24 has increased dramatically over the years. For this reason, many aspects of a server should be monitored. How are you going to monitor that the server is not low on disk space or running out of memory before you have a problem?

Leased Server: You can contract a number of online providers to monitor your server (about $10-50 per month) and notify you if a threshold is met. It is then up to you to get to the server (either physically go to the server or log in somehow) and see what the problem is, diagnosis it and fix it. It’s the response and repair that can be really expensive, especially if you need it on very short notice.

Dedicated Server: At Online Tech we monitor your server from multiple monitoring locations (including some from other geographies on the Internet) so that we always know the state of your server. Any issues cause alarms to be immediately sent to multiple engineers who then will pounce on the problem and work to resolve the issue and get the server back on line.

Savings: $10 - $50 per month plus response time to alarms.

Did you know that for some servers it can cost as much to power the server as it does to purchase it? When calculating the power costs, don’t forget the cooling. If you have a server that draws 500 watts of power, it will cost at least another 500 watts to cool it. 500 Watts of power costs about $40/month (.12 cents / KWHr), plus the cost to cool it is another $40/month – so that’s $80/month just for the power. And that’s “raw” power (see our blog entry on data center power). You also need to protect against power spikes and brownouts as they can actually damage the server.

Leased Server: At a minimum, purchasing an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) to keep your server running for a few hours when you lose power will run about $1000- $1500. After several hours, you need a generator to keep the server, network and Internet connection gear powered. Generators are extremely capital intensive.

Dedicated Server: All dedicated servers at Online Tech are kept in one of our SAS-70 audited data centers which include industrial size Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) and at least one generator.

Savings: $1000 - $1500 plus generator backups.

How are you going to backup the information on the server? How are you going to protect from data-loss due to fire, flood or theft of your data?

Leased Server: You can purchase a tape backup system with tapes or a disk backup system and take the data offsite to your home or other place regularly. If your building burns down at least you won’t have a total data loss. You should consider what happens if you misplace the backup data? Will your data be secure? Backup hardware and software can run $200 to $1,000. Also be sure to budget 2-4 hours per week of someone’s time to get the backups prepared and to make sure the backups are completed properly.

Dedicated Server: Online Tech’s offers tape-less, no-touch onsite and offsite (replicated through our private network to a data center 50 miles away) backup, much more cost effectively than having someone come and pick up your tapes.

Savings: $200 - $1000 plus 2-4 hours per week of time.

Excerpt from "Seven Cost Saving e-Tips to Cut TCO with Dedicated Servers"

A "naked" unprotected server on the Internet will be found and compromised by Internet robots in less than 45 minutes. So how are you going to secure the server from hackers?

Leased Server: Buy and manage security devices such as firewall; Intrusion Detection; Port Scan; SQL Injection and other types of attacks. You can hire a company to audit your server every 90 days and suggest/recommend additional security measures to keep abreast of the threats as they increase exponentially. These can be purchased for between $500 and $5000. Budget 4-8 hours of engineer time ($400 - $800) to setup the device and a few hours a month to monitor it do updates so you can stay ahead of the hackers. You’ll also need to budget 20% of the price of the security device for an annual subscription for virus updates. In the end the security will cost you more than the server and you just can’t live without it.

Dedicated Server: All Online Tech dedicated servers are protected by hardware firewalls with an easy upgrade to the state of the art Universal Threat Management offering powered by WatchGuard. These provide protection against Port Scans, Intrusion Detection and other nefarious threats.

Savings: $900 - $5800 plus $100 - $1000 per year on maintenance.

Excerpt from "Seven Cost Saving e-Tips to Cut TCO with Dedicated Servers"

How are you going to connect your server to the Internet? Will it be secure? What happens if your internet connection goes down for a few hours? How expensive is an Internet failure?

Leased Server: For the same level of uptime, you’ll need to contract for two different Internet companies and put both internet connections into a network router and program to sense when one of the connections fails and automatically fail over to the backup connection. Cost: $500 to $1000 for the network device and programming plus an additional Internet connection. An extra T1 line is likely to cost an extra $400 - $500 per month.

Dedicated Server: All Online Tech dedicated servers have dual, redundant connections to our redundant Cisco network which is connected to two separate Internet providers over gigabit fiber connections. It’s an infrastructure few companies can afford for themselves.

Savings: $500 - $1000 upfront and $400 - $500 per month.

Excerpt from "Seven Cost Saving e-Tips to Cut TCO with Dedicated Servers".

Leased Server: For any level of security, you’ll need to commit to a data closet with a locked door, proper cooling, maybe webcams or biometric finger print reader, alarms and other systems to protect the server from physical damage or loss or at least provide some forensic evidence as to who stole it should it go missing. The closet with proper cooling can start at $1000.

Dedicated Server: Online Tech places your dedicated server is in our SAS-70 audited data center with dual-factor authentication and biometrics for physical access, video cameras and locked in a secure private cage or rack.

Who’s going to unpack, configure, test and fire up your server? It’s easy to underestimate the time and importance of setting up a server right the first time. If you don’t build the server properly, the software won’t run properly or it will be highly insecure.

Leased Server: Hire a Systems Engineer to configure the server properly. To properly build, test and deploy a server can take 2 days of an engineer’s time. At $100/hour that’s $1,600.

Dedicated Server: Online Tech sets up the hardware, tests it, mounts it in our server racks, installs the OS all patches, scans for viruses, sets up the security, networking and firewall, installs multiple OS add-ons and any other software you wish.

Savings: $1,600.

Excerpt from "Seven Cost Saving e-Tips to Cut TCO with Dedicated Servers"

As the demands on IT increase, managing the expertise and resources required to support the entire IT delivery stack is becoming more difficult and more expensive for many mid-size firms. Many firms are finding that colocation offers an attractive alternative – outsourcing the data center infrastructure to experts that can provide higher levels of uptime at the same time keeping the mission critical knowledge of their data and business applications inside the company.

Colocation is a cap-ex free (no capital expense required) alternative to maintaining your own data center. Rather than invest the capital in backup generators, UPS and HVAC units, and network and the operating expense in trained data center expertise, colocation lets you leverage a multi-tenant data center that has already made the investment in the infrastructure and personnel.

By colocating in multi-tenant data centers, firms can take advantage of very high levels of expertise and uptime at a fraction of the cost of running their own data center. The multi-tenant data center effectively shares the infrastructure, operating costs, and access to experienced data center staff across a number of companies.

What's the difference between a dedicated server and a leased server?  A lot.  It’s like the difference between leasing a ship and taking a cruise. The difference isn’t just between a raw component and a complete service, it also impacts the total cost of total cost of ownership (TCO).

The e-Tips article gives 7 tips for how you can cut costs by leveraging a dedicated server solution over leasing a server. The 7 tips discuss set up costs, physical security, quality of the Internet connection, Internet security, back up costs, power and monitoring.

A good way to net out the difference between a leased server and a dedicated server is shown in the following table:

You Don't Need to Fight the SAS-70 Audit

Online Tech & UHY have partnered for a seminar for CIOs and IT Directors of publicly held companies or firms servicing publicly held companies on how to survive a SAS-70 Audit.

SAS-70 is a nationally recognized audit standard for evaluating process and security control procedures across the data center. A SAS-70 audit is done by a CPA firm and a data security expert with experience in data center and network security.

Certain types of data, by regulation, require a SAS-70 audit. Specifically, Sarbanes-Oxley calls for testing of internal IT controls that relate to financial reporting, even for outsourced IT functions. HIPAA also has specific data handling controls that can be confirmed with a SAS-70 audit report. PCI and CISP compliance can be more easily accomplished by starting with a SAS-70 audit.

Online Tech has successfully thrived through a number of SAS-70 audits. They recently completed an audit on all their data centers and have assisted a number of colocation and dedicated server clients survive their own SAS-70 audits. It’s these experiences from both the auditee and the service provider’s perspective that has helped identify the five key elements for not only surviving a SAS-70 audit, but thriving as a result of the audit.

Come hear Yan Ness, CEO of Online Tech at the May monthly lively morning program sponsored by the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce to keep members up-to-date on community and business issues.

Yan Ness talks about how data centers are really banks for data. Some people still keep their money stored under a mattress, but most keep it in a bank.” Where do you “bank” your data? Yan will give an overview of how companies can protect their digital assets with outsourced data centers.

Please pre-register by noon on Tuesday, May 19th.

$25 Chamber members / $35 Prospective members

Questions? Contact Barbara Davenport at 734.214.0104.