Month: February 2019

Tidy up your server

Tidying Up (Your Server) with Taka Masuda

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Tidy up your serverRecently, Netflix released an on-trend, reality television series called Tidying Up with Marie Kondo with a premise built on how Organizing Consultant, Marie Kondo, helps American families declutter and reorganize their household. Each episode follows Kondo as she addresses and resolves each family’s unique organizational needs using hands-on methods to tidy up their space as well as provide tips to help maintain it. Our office decided to create our own version…
\For those who are not familiar with the Netflix series, Kondo has developed her own organizing technique, known as the KonMari, in which she diligently performs whenever she tidies up. The steps are as follows: She first separates items into different categories – clothing, books, paper, Komono (kitchen, bathroom, garage and miscellaneous), and sentimental items. Then, she goes through each item individually and evaluates them by bringing the item close to her and asking herself how she feels about it–whether the item “sparks joy” for her or not, as she would only keep those that “sparks joy”.
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Taka Masuda

Inspired by the hit Netflix series, VPLS has put together a vlog of our own to help your business tidy up your server room. In our version of Tidying Up, instead of decluttering homes, we are decluttering servers. Additionally, as opposed to Marie Kondo being your knowledgeable guide, we have VPLS’ own Vice President of Network Engineering, Taka Masuda, walking you through his organizing process, cleverly named as the MasTaka technique, to help “spark joy” in your server room. Taka has been an engineer for VPLS for almost 13 years and has perfected his art of keeping servers organized. In our vlog, Tidying Up with Taka Masuda, watch how Taka tidies up the server room in order to have your business ready to switch over to the cloud.

To learn more about how VPLS’s professional services can help keep your business organized, contact us today!

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Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

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Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

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Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

It is a common, but deadly mistake, to use the term Backup (B/U) interchangeably with Disaster Recovery (DR). This misunderstanding could cause any number of data security and data recovery issues that could potentially destroy a company or at least its IT guy. There is an additional concept in the same vein known as Business Continuity (BC) – let’s do a gut check. To start with, a business continuity assessment is a high-level assessment of a company’s IT enterprise and systematically identifying and then eliminating single points of failure (SPOF) – such as a single core-network switch, standalone server, or a single connection to the internet.

When designing a high-availability IT environment, each component in the compute, network and storage areas are designed and implemented with layers of redundancy. The more critical your IT systems (I don’t know of any organizations that haven’t become totally dependent on their IT stuff) the more business continuity needs to be addressed. Backups and disaster recovery plans are subsets of a business continuity plan.

Many people believe that just a backup alone is sufficient to prevent the loss of data in the event of a disaster, however backup is merely one aspect of a business continuity plan. In order to ensure that a backup can be “stood up,” there also needs to be a disaster recovery plan which identifies and provisions the actual hardware and software to run the backup and bring the company’s IT systems back into operation.

What is Backup?

Backup is the process of making copies of files to have a historical record of data as it existed at a certain point in time. The specifications of backups call for the definition of the following:

Retention – the length of time data must be retained
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – designates the amount of “real time” that can pass before the disruption begins to impact business operations
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – the variable amount of data that will be lost or will have to be re-entered during an outage

Making backups of files these days is very simple, if the IT is virtualized – it is literally as easy as taking snapshots of files. It is one of the major advantages of virtualization- but that’s a separate discussion. Just because it’s easy to make a backup doesn’t mean recovering data from those backups is easy. “Standing up” a backup requires the ability to restore the backup (snapshot) on a computing platform (hardware and software) capable of duplicating the operational parameters of the existing computing platform with the existing IT infrastructure. It doesn’t sound simple? It’s not – backing up is easy – restoring isn’t. That’s where verification testing comes in. Verify your backups.

But what happens when the whole existing IT infrastructure is gone? That’s a disaster.

What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery (DR) is a set of procedures, hardware (computers, network, storage) and software (OS and applications) that allow a company to restore operations in the case of such a disaster.

Darryl Vidal, VPLS’s Director of Operations, stresses the importance that VPLS places in having both backup and disaster recovery. “You have to do both; if you have a backup but no disaster recovery plan, your backup could be sitting in a cloud with no resources to make it operational.” VPLS offers a variety of services to ensure that our customers’ data is secure if a failure, hack, virus. or natural disaster occurs.

Disaster Recovery must be considered in the context of. “what will we do if the data center office burns down?” Any and all types of backups can be rendered useless in the case of some disaster that takes out the whole building. For instance, if the building housing your data center were destroyed, what would be required to bring “critical” systems back online? Finance, manufacturing, email, and database systems would need to be back online first. Is there a complete backup of data, applications, operating systems, that could be brought into production on some standard hardware? Are the backup recovery procedures documented? If not, that really means that in a disaster, your company couldn’t come back up in weeks or even months.

To be clear, backups and disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity planning. BC seeks to identify all likely single-points of failure (SPOF), and implement equipment, processes and procedures to address each one – including backups and DR provisioning.

To begin the business continuity assessment process, take a systematic top-down approach, and review each potential point-of-failure. Then address each according to its level of criticality. Obviously, this means an assessment of criticality comes first. Start with a BC and DR plan. Then create the backup and recovery plan.

The best news is that today, these can be purchases from a Managed Services Provider (MSP) like VPLS. Backup as a Service (BaaS) is the service to have VPLS run your backups on our enterprise infrastructure. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) adds the extra layer of actual hardware and software infrastructure to “stand up” your backup images in our Data Center infrastructure in the case of an attack, outage, or natural disaster.

Add to that the benefit of procuring BaaS or DRaaS without any capital outlay – a true opportunity to move from a CapEx to an OpEx IT finance model.

Verify Backup and DR Practices

Finally, verification of backup and DR practices are often not performed because of the huge resource draw and potential down-time caused by such an exercise. But, by having these services provide by an Managed Services Provider, DR verification testing should happen at least twice a year, if not quarterly. We don’t need to discuss why it isn’t done – convenience, opportunity, downtime -but the risk of not planning and documenting a full recovery operation only insures that when, or it, this disaster happens, the organization really doesn’t know if the processes and procedures will actually work. A situation best described as untenable.

To learn more about how VPLS can help businesses with business continuity and disaster recovery, visit VPLS Backup Solutions.

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VPLS Marketing Team
As a worldwide leader in internet infrastructure and computing, VPLS partners with businesses to solve their most complex technology challenges. Have a question about the article? Contact our team at [email protected].
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A Special Krypt Promotion for Our Dedicated Users

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A Special Krypt Promotion for Our Dedicated Users

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Why should you choose Krypt as your server host?

Since our founding in 1998, Krypt has soared into prominence as the dedicated server and hosting division of VPLS, Inc., and currently hosts more than five million websites, as well as 500,000 IPv4 web addresses. And now until the end of February, Krypt is offering its top-rated dedicated servers at a special discounted price! Read on to find out more details about this exclusive offer!

About Our Dedicated Servers

Krypt provides state-of-the-art dedicated servers to our clients, which can be self-managed, and which come equipped with a whole host of powerful features that bring added value to clients. All these servers are manufactured by Intel, the gold standard of servers, and we offer services on a wide range of servers, starting with 8GB of RAM, 500GB of storage, and 10TB of bandwidth. For clients with more robust requirements, we can go all the way up to 128GB of RAM, 240GB of storage, and 10TB of bandwidth. In between these low and high end servers, we offer a great many other options for all those customers who fall somewhere in between, in their computing needs.

Bare Metal Servers

If you’re interested in renting a high-powered server for your exclusive use, we can provide you with a number of different bare-metal server models, along with the assurance that you will be the only client using them. You can choose from processors such as the low-power Atom server to the super-efficient quad-core Xeon processors. You’ll enjoy dedicated resources like CPU, memory, bandwidth, and storage, with total administrator access, and you can also choose from one of three levels of managed services. Any of our supported operating systems can be deployed onto your bare metal server in a matter of minutes, and you can re-deploy as often as needed.

Special Promotion

Since January 15th, and continuing on through February 28th, Krypt is offering a very special promotion on its dedicated servers. Called the ‘Chinese New Year Promotion’, it allows you to subtract 30% of the normal cost of a dedicated server. All you have to do when contacting us is mention the coupon code of C97N19KT, and you’ll be entitled to this very significant discount off the normal price. This promotion is extended to include all upgrades and add-ons, and pre-payment discounts can also be used until the end of February. The end of the month will be coming up fast, so act now to take advantage of the savings you can achieve while this special promotion remains in effect and contact us today!

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VPLS Marketing Team
As a worldwide leader in internet infrastructure and computing, VPLS partners with businesses to solve their most complex technology challenges. Have a question about the article? Contact our team at [email protected].
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Fiber Optics Partnership

Investment and Partnership with Fiber Internet Center in Silicon Valley, CA

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Evocative is expanding its network and internet services in the Silicon Valley and Los Angeles Markets.

San Jose, CA, February 13, 2019 – Evocative, a leading national provider of secure, compliant hybrid and multi-cloud Internet services, today announced that it is investing and partnering with Fiber Internet Center located in Palo Alto, CA. Evocative’s initial minority investment in Fiber Internet Center will increase to an outright purchase of the company pending regulatory approval from the California Public Utilities Commission. The two companies will start working together to integrate their layer 1 – 3 network and services immediately to offer a seamless network, colocation, hosting and multi-cloud service solutions.

Fiber Internet Center and Fiber International

Fiber Internet Center and Fiber International (a California licensed CLEC) was started in 2001 by Bob Evans and Gus Sanchez who built and selected their customers and helped them navigate their network needs. Much of the customer base started with a few people, then grew to thousands of employees. This base continues to merge, go public or be acquired.

Others are fortune 500 companies that demand highly reliable, ultra-high-speed internet connectivity. The company provides network and internet services in 150 buildings and data centers in Northern and Southern California. The company has dense network capacity in the City of Palo Alto with immediate access to reach an additional 500 buildings. Evocative is at the forefront of the IT transformation and we believe a multi-cloud hybrid IT internet services to be the foundation for enterprises of all sizes. We are one step closer to delivering a full-service solution for our clients ranging from network, colocation, hosting to multi-cloud services. “We are thrilled to partner with Fiber Internet Center and Bob Evans. We like to take this opportunity in welcoming all FIC clients, employees and partners to the Evocative family” said Arman Khalili CEO of Evocative.

About Evocative

Evocative is a leading national provider of secure, compliant hybrid and multi-cloud Internet services company. Evocative provides Network, Colocation, Hosting and multi-cloud services in 5 markets Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas and Reston, VA. For additional information on our services, please request contact us using our online form.

About Fiber Internet Center

Fiber Internet Center has been providing carrier-grade, reliable, ultra high-speed fiber and internet services to the Silicon Valley market since 2001. For additional services please visit Fiber Internet Center

MEDIA CONTACT: Matt Schryver 480.567.6186 [email protected]

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