LFC
Hosting Announces Innovative Client Backup System
[October 15, 2004]
LFC
Hosting today announces the completion of its new Multi-Terabyte
backup solution utilizing a cluster of modern portable
IDE hard drives
Regina,
Saskatchewan, Canada - LFC Hosting today announces the
completion of its new Multi-Terabyte backup solution
utilizing a cluster of modern portable IDE hard drives,
as opposed to the standard magnetic tape based systems
used by most data centers.
Only recently has this approach become feasible, reliable,
and cost-effective. LFC Hosting is one of the first
hosts to take advantage of this new technology, and
pass it on to its customers.
Key features of LFC's new backup system
include:
- Multiple portable hard disks, superior
to industry standard magnetic tapes
- Weekly Full backups
- Daily Incremental backups
- Complete Windows state and permission backups
- Extremely fast backup and restore times
- Full or partial on-the-fly, self-administrable backups
and restores through LFC's proprietary Control Panel
- Rapid Disaster Recovery ability
- Separate Gigabit backup network for increased speed
and security
- Dedicated backup servers
- Off-site storage and verification
Robert Sauchyn, LFC CEO, says, "Although
most of us don't like to think about it, disasters in
the web hosting industry do occur, sometimes resulting
in extended periods of downtime and loss of income.
Good backups and Disaster Recovery support are two key
components of reliability, and are the ones most often
overlooked. Overall, we have found our new IDE hard
drive based backup system faster, easier to maintain,
and more reliable, scalable, and cost-effective over
the tape backup systems provided by competing services.
Tapes are much more likely to become corrupt and have
much slower backup and restore times. We are able to
backup and restore data approximately 3 times faster
than competing services."
Tape drives with robotic magazines (needed
for large tape capacity) are complex with many intricate
moving parts. If a tape drive fails, it can take days,
or even weeks to get a proprietary replacement. Conversely,
hard drives are an easily sourced commodity, allowing
LFC to replace individual drives quickly and easily.
Moreover, IDE hard drives are rapidly increasing in
size and decreasing in cost; as this happens, LFC will
easily replace or add new drives for increased capacity
at a decreasing cost. All of this results in increased
reliability with lower operating costs that LFC is able
to pass on to its customers.
Andrew MacCorquodale, LFC VP, says,
"The advantage of being the first to embrace new
technology is that, more often than not, an off-the-shelf
product or solution simply does not exist, or is not
mature enough to be put into large-scale production.
Substantial in-house research and development was required
to build a tried-and-true backup solution to protect
our customers' data." Here are only some of the
many ways that LFC Hosting has customized their approach
to effectively offer a backup system far exceeding the
industry standard.
1. LFC Hosting performs complete daily
data backups to multiple sets of hard drives, rotating
them on a weekly basis on their own network of dedicated
backup servers.
Andrew MacCorquodale, LFC VP, says,
"This allows us to store a set of drives at another
location in case of a fire or natural disaster, achieving
the same off-site advantages of magnetic tapes."
2. LFC's new backup solution employs
the award-winning Retrospect software package. The Disaster
Recovery capabilities of Retrospect allow a non-bootable
computer to be started using a special disaster recovery
CD, customized for LFC's network. The CD quickly installs
an operating system and restores the data from backup
automatically, elevating LFC's disaster recovery support
to a level well above the industry standard.
Robert Sauchyn, LFC CEO, says, "This
has reduced the time needed to completely rebuild a
server from scratch in the event of a total crash or
natural disaster from days down to as little as one
hour, putting us among the best in the industry."
Furthermore, Retrospect allows LFC to
get a complete snapshot of both their Windows web servers
and Linux network-related servers without ever having
to stop providing services.
3. LFC has extended Retrospects' abilities
with a proprietary custom permission handler that was
developed in-house.
Robert Sauchyn, LFC CEO, says, "This
allows us to perform much faster restores than with
Retrospect alone and ensures that all custom Windows
file and ASP.NET permissions are restored perfectly
intact (custom permissions can be completely administered
through our proprietary advanced Control Panel)."
This advantage is only found with LFC Hosting!
4. LFC takes web data backup to another
level by providing full OOPS! Backup Administration
through its own innovative, proprietary control panel.
Through LFC's control panel, its customers can view
backups of their entire web folder for each day over
the past week and download and restore backups on the
fly, without any participation by LFC staff. They can
even browse through a backup for any given day using
a simple graphical interface and download or restore
specific files only.
Robert Sauchyn, LFC CEO, says, "This
feature is invaluable as it gives our clients full control
over their own backups; full backups or individual files
can be restored instantly and automatically by our clients,
without having to contact us. With competing services,
if you accidentally overwrite or delete a file, you
would normally have to contact technical support and
wait several days to get your file back."
5. LFC Hosting's backup system includes
its own set of dedicated backup servers. The backup
cluster is independent from the rest of the network,
and does not rely on any other servers to continue backing
up the rest of the network.
Andrew MacCorquodale, LFC VP, says,
"If a server or set of servers fail, our dedicated
backup cluster is still able to perform backups on the
rest of the network at full capacity. Furthermore, by
moving all backup and restore software and hardware
to a separate network of servers, we avoid putting any
additional load on the web and network-related servers,
ensuring that all other hosting services continue to
operate in the fastest, more reliable manner possible,
and that our clients' websites continue to load as quickly
as possible."
6. Magnetic tapes require regular (time
consuming) re-formatting and tape drives require regular
cleaning as well as other maintenance. Each LFC Hosting
hard drive features S.M.A.R.T. (Self Monitoring, Analysis
and Reporting Technology), virtually eliminating the
need for maintenance, and offering excellent detection
of failures.
7. The backup system is connected to
LFC's web and network-related servers through a completely
isolated Gigabit network. This prevents the backup traffic
from interfering with LFC's main network, resulting
in faster load times for the websites of LFC's customers
than with many competing services. The Gigabit network
also well exceeds the required capacity of LFC's backup
system, making it fast, efficient, and scalable.
Andrew MacCorquodale, LFC VP, says,
"We schedule backups on each server at different
strategic times throughout the day. This ensures that
the backup network does not become overloaded, maximizes
backup performance, minimizes the load on each server,
and prevents backups from interfering whatsoever with
the normal operation of the servers."
8. Finally, with its modular design,
LFC's new backup system grows with them. This varies
from industry standard tape-based systems, which require
a large initial investment and can typically only grow
to a point. Additional drives, servers, and Gigabit
network segments can be easily added to the pool at
a consistent cost when necessary.
Robert Sauchyn, LFC CEO, says, "All
of this represents LFC Hosting's dedication to doing
things differently, and passing on the cost savings
and increased reliability to our customers!"
To learn more about LFC Hosting's new,
innovative backup system and other disaster recovery
solutions, please see:
http://www.lfchosting.com/scripts/details.cgi?25&1
LFC is a sound web hosting and e-commerce
solution provider that has grown rapidly since their
launch in 1996 because of their unique approach to web
hosting: They offer a competitive, flat rate service
including everything a business of any size needs to
develop, deploy, and manage an aggressive, profitable,
enterprise-level presence on the Internet, vital for
survival in today's marketplace. LFC Hosting welcomes
you to visit their website today to compare LFC Hosting
with your current hosting service, and find out how
LFC can allow your business to take advantage of new
possibilities online, before your competition does.
More information on LFC Hosting's innovative hosting
services can be found at:
http://www.lfchosting.com
Quotes used with permission:
"I've never found a Hosting Provider
so committed to service as LFC Hosting. From my experienced
standpoint (I worked from 1997 to 2000 as key account
manager for UNI2 - the leading spanish/french ISP and
Hosting Provider), I know how difficult it is sometimes
to provide high quality standards in service, and I
feel impressed about the way you guys have managed my
requests. At this moment I was browsing your technical
FAQ while feeling so excited about the easy way things
can be done using your services."
- P. Deeleman
"I am a current customer that is
pleased to acknowledge LFC for its continuing efforts
and, since 2000, for providing us with over 20 high
traffic sites with excellent service, reliability and
low costs. I would recommend LFC to the new and professional
Webmasters who are looking for total web solutions!"
- R. Shefferd |
