LightEdge Partners with EMC to offer Enterprise-grade Managed Backup and Recovery Platform

Earlier this year LightEdge and EMC partnered to bring the sophisticated de-duplication and storage environments to market as a hosted backup and recovery service.  Managed Backup and Recovery, the new service available through LightEdge, is a enterprise-grade backup and storage offering that eliminates the need for on-site tape storage, transportation and archiving. LightEdge is excited to offer this new service as the storage platform can be used by customers with servers in our data center or on their corporate premises over a private LightEdge connection or the Internet.

LightEdge is proud to have established such a strong relationship with such a prominent company in the industry. EMC is the leader in data storage software and hardware solutions with $14.9 billion in revenue during 2008, over 40,000 employees in 400 sales offices and partners supporting over 60 countries around the world.  The company has the world’s largest sales and service force focused on information infrastructure and has over the past 4 years acquired and integrated more than 40 growth-oriented software and services companies to offer the best information infrastructure to support the growing data needs of business.

“This project has become an enormous strategic upgrade for us in the market”, said Jim Masterson, chairman and CEO of LightEdge.  “The reduction in overall platform costs and the ability to scale, allow the company to be more competitive with small and medium-sized businesses by offering secure, reliable backup and recovery options to businesses that otherwise would be forced to continue relying on in-house tape backup.”

“LightEdge is a great example of how a company can leverage cutting-edge technologies not only for their own business, but for its customers as well,” said Rob Emsley, Senior Director of Storage Software Product Marketing, EMC Corporation.  “As data protection requirements continue to rise, LightEdge is giving SMBs a cost-effective and efficient way to backup their critical data, without carrying the burden of a physical footprint.  We’re pleased to work with LightEdge and look forward to helping them maximize their business as their needs continue to grow in the future.”

LightEdge will be offering its Managed Backup and Recovery service with several different options:

• Internet - Backup agents are installed on customer servers, data is backed up to LightEdge storage grid over the Internet
  
• Remote - Backup agents are installed on customer servers, data is backed up to LightEdge storage grid over the company’s LightEdge WAN
  
• Local Data Center Backup - A customer server within the LightEdge data center is backed up to local data center storage grid
  
• Local Data Center Backup with Replication - A customer server within the LightEdge data center is backed up to the local data center storage grid and replicated to the grid in a remote LightEdge data center
  
• Vaulting Only - A customer server within the LightEdge data center is backed up to a remote data center only

Bits and Bytes on Storage

• Reliance on tape alone for data recovery is no longer a best practice
• More than 80% of restore requests are made within 48 hours of the data loss
• 60~70% of storage management effort is devoted to Backup/Restore
• 15% of a storage administrator’s time is spent on recovery operations
• 5~20% of Backup/Restore jobs fail nightly
• Backup and Recovery costs are approximately $5,935 per TB of disk storage per year
  (META Group, April 1, 2004 )

You are invited to a Storage Seminar at Principal Park

EMC and LightEdge would like to invite you to a fun and informative event related to Backup and Replication of your company's critical data. With business data storage rates growing exponentially, many businesses are looking for new storage opportunities that may reduce the company's storage footprint, improve backup response time or reduce the complexity of the corporate storage platform.

Meet us at Principal Park to listen to experts from EMC discuss storage challenges and best practices and learn more about the LightEdge Managed Backup and Recovery offering.

Agenda

• Storage Trends and Best Practices
• Risks and Hazards of Tape Backup
• Advantages of Disk-based Backup
• De-duplication Strategies
• Managed Backup and Replication Services through LightEdge Solutions
• Data Center Overview (SAS-70, Redundancies and more)

April 22, 2009

• Breakfast 8:00 - 9:00 a.m.
• Presentation 9:00 - 11:30 a.m.
• Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
• Iowa Cubs Game 12:00 - 3:00
• Continental Breakfast and Lunch will be provided
• Stay for the Iowa Cubs game

RSVP Required

Sponsors

Location

Principal Park
One Line Drive
Des Moines, IA 50309

Click for Directions

Ouch! The Cost Of SMBs' Communications Pain Points

By Scott Campbell, ChannelWeb Feb. 26, 2009

Communications, or the lack thereof, is a source of pain to the majority of small and midsize businesses, according to new research sponsored by Siemens Enterprise Communications. The study, conducted by SIS International Research, also found that nearly 60 percent of SMBs do not have a unified communications solution in place, but that awareness of the technology is rising, signifying a big opportunity for the channel, according to Siemens.

The No. 1 communications pain point for SMBs is waiting for information, defined as the time it takes to reach someone to pass along information or get an answer, according to Siemens. Rounding out the top five were unwanted communications, inefficient coordination, barriers to collaboration and customer complaints.

On average, 70 percent of SMB respondents said they experience the top five pain points, and 17.5 hours each week is spent addressing communications barriers. The study also found that the average cost of the lost productivity due to dealing with these pain points was $26,041 per knowledge worker per year, or about $5,246 per employee.

HIPAA enforcement getting stronger

Rebecca Herold, Contributor 03.23.2009 TechTarget

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted to create standards for the security and privacy of individual medical data. Actual compliance with HIPAA regulations by the health care industry and HIPAA enforcement by government agencies has been a different story.

The U.S. Congress enacted HIPAA on Aug. 21, 1996. The HIPAA Privacy Rule went into effect in April 2001, and gave covered entities (CEs), otherwise known as health care providers, clearinghouses or health plans, two years to meet compliance. The HIPAA Security Rule went into effect in April 2003 and CEs had until April 2005 to get into compliance.

Avoid these architecture mistakes in your disaster recovery planning

By Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer 02 Apr 2009 | SearchCIO.com

The complexity of IT systems today accounts for 80% of systems downtime, yet companies design their disaster recovery systems in the same way -- complexly -- representing one of the biggest mistakes in disaster recovery planning. So say different experts schooled in the disaster recovery (DR) discipline, suggesting that the secret to effective, long-term disaster recovery planning is hidden in the biggest mistakes they see companies make.

A disaster recovery plan for branch offices: Five layers of redundancy

By Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer 19 Mar 2009 | SearchCIO.com

For some organizations, it takes an act of God to get serious about a disaster recovery plan for remote offices and branch offices. For Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), the organization's mission to treat patients like family members was more than enough motivation to make sure IT did it right, said CIO Chad Eckes. The proximate cause was a move from paper to electronic health records.

"Our promise to the patients was that we could ensure all of the appropriate documentation for their care was available as they moved through our very complex and very speedy system of treatment. We literally operate faster than any other organization that I know of in health care," said Eckes, who was recruited in December 2005 to spearhead the digital makeover at the for-profit CTCA, which has hospitals in suburban Chicago; Philadelphia; Tulsa, Okla.; and suburban Phoenix.

As recession deepens, IT transformation best tackled in chunks

By Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer 11 Mar 2009 | SearchCIO.com

In 2005, CUNA Mutual Group began a massive effort to transform business processes to boost profitability. The Madison, Wis.-based organization provides insurance and other financial services to credit unions and their members. The move was not wildly popular with many of the organization's 4,700 employees. CUNA, after all, was a giant in the credit union insurance industry, with 95% market share.

When IT disaster recovery plan is put to the test, VoIP becomes savior

By Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer 26 Feb 2009 | SearchCIO.com

For Alliant Energy Corp., a Madison, Wis.-based gas and electric company, the test of its IT disaster recovery plan came fast and furiously last June when flood waters swept over its Cedar Rapids, Iowa, territory. Over a few days, high water knocked out not only generating facilities and substations in Iowa, but also the unthinkable: its 21-story downtown central facility, including the data center and network operations center housed on the fifth floor. More than 800 Alliant Energy employees were displaced, and 35,000 customers were left without power.

 

Say "No" to tape with LightEdge Managed Backup and Recovery Service

LightEdge Managed Backup solves the challenges associated with traditional backup, enabling fast, reliable backup and recovery for remote offices, data center LANs and VMware® environments. The LightEdge backup and recovery platform utilizes patented data de-duplication technology from EMC to identify redundant data segments at the source (or client), reducing daily backup data by up to 500x - before it is transferred across the network and stored to disk. This allows companies to optimize their WAN bandwidth and encrypt backup data for additional security.

One of the key drivers impacting backup performance is the growing volume of data that must be protected in a shortening backup window. Traditional solutions are inefficient because they back up everything - including duplicate data files and sub-file data segments that exist across the corporate network. When combined with traditional incremental and weekly full backup schedules, the impact of duplicate data is staggering - companies often move more than 200 percent of their primary data every week.

The impact is more pronounced in virtualized environments. On virtual platforms, each virtual machine represents an individual backup job, often with concurrent or overlapping backup windows, and includes redundant operating system, application and file data. As a result, backups for virtual machines can often tax shared physical resources and potentially overrun the backup window leaving data unprotected.

Managed Backup and Recovery Options
For something as important as the backup and recovery of your businesses most critical data, there is no “one size fits all” solution. LightEdge has many ways to secure your businesses data based on your size, industry and regulatory compliance needs.

• Internet - Backup agents are installed on customer servers, data is backed up to LightEdge storage grid over the Internet
  
• Remote - Backup agents are installed on customer servers, data is backed up to LightEdge storage grid over the company’s LightEdge WAN
  
• Local Data Center Backup - A customer server within the LightEdge data center is backed up to local data center storage grid
  
• Local Data Center Backup with Replication - A customer server within the LightEdge data center is backed up to the local data center storage grid and replicated to the grid in a remote LightEdge data center
  
• Vaulting Only - A customer server within the LightEdge data center is backed up to a remote data center only

Features	Benefits
Global source-based de-duplication	Reduce daily backup data up to 500x, backup times up to 10x, and total storage up to 50x.
Wide area network (WAN) backups	Eliminate the need for local tape infrastructure and enable cost-effective online retention.
High availability and reliability	Achieve fault tolerance across storage nodes and verify data recoverability on a daily basis.
Fast, single-step recovery	Recover data (whole backups, files, or directories) immediately, without restoring your last full and incremental backups.
VMware Infrastructure backups	Reduce resource utilization on highly consolidated host servers; support Guest, ESX Service Console, and VCB backups.
Tape backup integration	Blend de-duplication capabilities with traditional backup and recovery using a common management interface and backup window.
Flexible deployment	Choose between integrated software/hardware, software on certified industry-standard servers, and VMware virtual appliance

>>Learn about Managed Backup and Recovery

Contact LightEdge for more information and a proposal for your business needs.
877-771-3343

Hosted Microsoft SharePoint

Hosted SharePoint allows you to quickly create rich document and information sharing portals for your business without the need for any outside programming.

• Document Management
  Secure central repository for all share documents in the office with functionality for check-in, check-out, version history and alerts when items are modified.
  
  
• Corporate Intranet
  Complete with announcements, Blog, discussion groups and RSS feeds.
  
  
• Project Management
  Run your department more effectively with a shared hub of information including assigned tasks and status reporting.

Call 877.771.3343 or info@lightedge.com to learn more

Hosted Microsoft Live Meeting

Microsoft Office Live Meeting is a hosted web conferencing service that connects audiences for online meetings, training sessions, software demonstrations and remote collaborative initiatives. With meeting attendees participating from their PCs, you can deliver a presentation, kick off a project, brainstorm ideas, edit files, collaborate on whiteboards, and negotiate deals at a fraction of the cost and without the hassle of travel.

• More Collaboration. Less Travel
  Get more done with fewer face-to-face meetings by limiting your need for travel.
  
  
• Engage your Audience
  Deliver multi-media presentations including presentation slides, live and recorded video, application sharing and audience feedback tools.
  
  
• Easy for any Meeting Size
  Whether you are collaborating with a colleague in another city or presenting a business model shift to the entire company, Live Meeting is easy to simple to use.

Call 877.771.3343 or info@lightedge.com to learn more