R1Soft, backup solutions for webhosting companies and server environments

R1Soft is a leader of backup software industry, today we are pleased to have on HostingTalk.it this company with Ash Patel, Sales Engineer of R1Soft. I'm so curious about this company that the first thing that i did was read R1Soft's story in their dedicated page: http://www.r1soft.com/company/about-us/. David tells a success story, from university and from his first company, ActionWeb Services, he created a successful company leader in the backup solutions. The idea behind was to change the approach to backup solution, switching from tape-based system to hd-based system, less complex and less expensive, with the opportunity to handle better backup images.

In 2003 David create a new business, webhosting industry was moving fast and all servers, cheap dedicated servers (David tell about the "99$ webserver"), cluster solutions or big datacenters needed a good solution to backup their data.

From R1Soft: "I learned there were thousands of people in the same situation I was in years earlier. They need backups but don’t have any solid solution. Being the very clever people that they are, they quickly figured out they could get second hard drives in their servers, or copy files between servers. Service providers like Rackshack started selling storage space on ftp servers to accommodate this.

An entire industry, data centers full of tens-of-thousands of servers, all have nothing more than homegrown shell scripts and ftp to backup their data."

Today R1Soft provide software to a wise target of customers, from the small customer that need to backup his webhosting server to big datacenters that need complex solution to backup thousands of servers, Ash tried to explain us how works R1Soft's software and what are the solutions for each environments.

Products of R1Soft: http://www.r1soft.com/products/cdp-server-20/what-is-cdp/

Hi Ash, welcome on HostingTalk.it, so i think we can start with something about R1soft, can you tell us what is the business core of R1Soft and something about its history?

Hello Stefano, thank you for having me. R1Soft’s core business is providing high-performance backup/recovery software for Linux and Windows platforms at an affordable price. Our history dates back to 2003 when a young and ambitious entrepreneur named David Wartell saw the need for a superior backup solution in the webhosting industry. For him, ‘tar’ and ‘rsync’ weren’t true backup tools. Through his efforts, R1soft was born and under his leadership, R1Soft has grown into a preeminent provider of superior disaster recovery software.

Ok Ash, can you explain what is your role in R1soft as sales engineer? 

The Sales Engineer role is multifaceted. Of course, my primary role is to be an asset to our sales force. I am also an advocate for the customer. I listen to their feedback and take suggestions back to our development team. Other responsibilities include demonstrations of our product and pre/post sales support.

Talking about R1Soft's CDP solution, how many software and how many solutions?

Currently, R1Soft’s product line is in 2 segments. CDP Standalone and CDP for Datacenters. The Standalone product is designed for smaller deployments and the DC is targeted for larger solutions needing more scalability and flexibility for growth. Underneath these product lines, we offer an arrary of modules which support control panel integration, archiving, and granular MySQL restore capabilities. We currently protect over 100,000 servers worldwide.

So, disaster recovery, continuous data protection, archiving, how you explain all those terms to a client? Why they are so important for a server environment today?

Disaster recovery is the ability to quickly recover mission-critical data in an event such as disk failure. Continuous Data Protection (CDP), from an industry standpoint, is the ability to take point-in-time snapshots as often as every 5-10 minutes, without any server interruptions, allowing you to potentially never lose more than 10 minutes of data. Archiving is the ability to back up your backed up data to the storage medium of your choice, if you don’t want to keep your data only on hard disk. R1Soft now provides a method to automatically store data off-site via CIFS, FTP, SFTP. In other words, if a fire destroys the DC where your backups are, you can still have a fresh copy somewhere else.

Having worked in the webhosting industry for 4+ years I know that things like server compromise (hack), hardware failure, and human error are inevitable. Protecting your data is the last defense against these occurrences. Without solid backups, you run the risks of downtime, lost revenue and customers, and ultimately your business. I have seen small hosting companies fail because they didn’t protect their data.

You provide a bare-metal disaster recovery, what are the benefits of this solution, how does it works?

Our Bare-Metal Restore solution is the best in the business. With R1Soft’s Bare-Metal Restore technology, customers can restore their server to any point-in-time where they have backed up from. What really separates us is that we provide the 3 different mediums to do the BMR in and that we have full support for MD, LVM. An ISO disk, a Live Boot script, and PXE image for your TFPT server. Once the target machine is in this recovery state and has an IP, the CDP Server can deploy and image to it. We have full support for MD devices, LVM, and Dynamic Disks. We will also soon be releasing a best of breed Windows Pre-Execution Environment which we are very excited about.

What is your primary target for R1Soft Products?

Our primary target is the Web hosting Industry. Certain components of our producst, such as Control Panel integration, make us a preferred choice among Web hosts. Within this market, there was a need for an advanced backup solution beyond tar/rsync. By satisfying this need, we have become the backup provider of choice.

I think that R1Soft now is a leader of software backup in the world, but i want to ask to you what challenges you see for the future, two in particular, virtualization and cloud computing. How you will deploy solutions for those environments?

In recent years, there has been a shift in society, and in business, to go ‘green’. Through this need for social/corporate responsibility, the technology community has contributed with the promotion of virtualization and cloud computing with the goal of more efficiently using valuable resources. We at R1Soft know that adapting to trends, whether social or business, is vital to our sustained growth and prosperity. We make every effort to ensure compatibility with major virtualization technologies such as VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V.

MySQL, what is the core feature of your solution for this DBMS? We know that it's a "fragile" component in each web server or application server, and backup without interruption Mysql it's a good problem for any sysadmin.

The backup of any DBMS is a challenging task for any System Admin responsible for mission critical servers. If the DBMS is down, everything is down. In the webhosting industry downtime is unacceptable. The core feature of our MySQL add-on ensures that the snapshots attained are consistent, meaning that all transactions are flushed to disk before a snapshot is taken. Along with this, we give users the ability to granularly restore specific tables. With table corruption being common in many DBMS, this is a tremendous feature for our customers.

Can you tell us some stories in hosting industry about data loss?

While working at a large hosting company, I witnessed a situation where a server was attacked because it had one ‘political’ website on it. In total, there were over 500 sites, but the attacker wanted to bring down 1. He was able to gain root access through a now secured Perl exploit. We think he did ‘rm –rf /’ and destroyed the whole box. The customer asked, ‘How do I recover my data.” We said, “From your backups.” I don’t think he had any backups.

By Stefano Bellasio for HostingTalk.it