Plan B Disaster RecoveryDisaster Recovery Service
Jul 26
Plan B Announce launch of US Service

The Plan B DR Service is now available directly in the US. Plan B, has licensed its technology to Weidenhammer, a US-based IT services company who are offering the Plan B DR service under the US brand name of vRescue.

vRescue DR Service

The US Rescue Silo is operational and already protecting customers. Plan B are delighted with this initial move into the US and look forward to delivering the benefits already available to UK and European customers to US businesses through Weidenhammer.

Plan B launches virtualised disaster recovery service into US

Plan B, the fast growing UK based disaster recovery (DR) specialist, has launched its service in the US. This international expansion means that Plan B DR’s unique, enterprise class disaster recovery technology will be available for the first time, at an affordable price, to small and medium sized businesses across the US.

This move also coincides with Plan B DR’s rapid UK channel expansion with 20 new resellers now actively selling the DR service.

Plan B DR has signed a technology agreement with US-based IT services company, Weidenhammer, to licence and market its DR service under a US brand name, vRescue. Plan B will provide the training, technology, support and product development for vRescue. and has designed a 24/7 N+1 recovery facility, based at Weidenhammer’s data centre in Reading, PA.

Plan B DR will also work with Weidenhammer to build a new US partner channel and make vRescue the first guaranteed, managed DR solution for the 625,000 small and medium enterprises across the US.

Plan B DR’s virtualisation-based DR managed service is inexpensive, very simple to implement and is unique in guaranteeing to recover working servers, network and infrastructure - within minutes of a disaster striking. This enables organisations to rapidly restore business continuity of critical applications and data.

Ian Daly at Plan B DR said, “We are delighted to announce this expansion into the US with our partners Weidenhammer. We obviously see the US as a great opportunity for Plan B’s technology and the launch of vRescue enables us to provide the same great advantages of the Plan B Service locally within the States. We have been working hard with Weidenhammer on setting up vRescue and already have our fist customers onboard and being protected.”

John Weidenhammer, CEO, Weidenhammer said, “We are very excited about the opportunities for vRescue and our progress so far. Disaster recovery solutions have traditionally been too expensive or resource intensive for our clients to consider viable. Using Plan B DR’s underlying expertise, vRescue, will offer the US the first fully managed service that is cost effective and ensures business continuity of mission critical systems in the event of an emergency or system outage.”

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About Plan B

Plan B http://www.planbdr.co.uk offers the only affordable IT Disaster Recovery service guaranteed to recover fully working systems within 30mins. Plan B are a UK based company that offers its unique service directly and through distributors in Europe and through a joint venture in the US.

About Weidenhammer

Founded in 1978, Weidenhammer is an information technology firm providing innovative products and services that is celebrating 30 years of information ingenuity. Weidenhammer specializes in working with organizations to use information technology as a strategic tool for education administration, government, and diverse business industries.

With nearly 200 IT professionals in seven locations, Weidenhammer confronts one of the most critical and complex resources of business administration: information. Weidenhammer provides consulting expertise in the areas of Strategic Planning, Business Process Improvement, Application Development, Network Infrastructure, and Application Hosting. The Managed Services and Infrastructure Solutions Group supports a large client base through network and communications services and solutions that lower the cost and improve performance of IT infrastructures.

At the core of Weidenhammer’s approach to serving clients is a focus on achieving and maintaining the highest degree of alignment between clients’ business strategies and the appropriate application for information technology. To learn more, please visit; http://www.hammer.net


Apr 08
Burne House fire

Plan B provided cover for a number of customers effected by last week’s flood and subsequent fire at BT’s aptly named ‘Burne House’ exchange in London.

The outage effected at least 437 local exchanges and over 37,000 data circuits, and took BT four days to fully recover from. If it hadn’t happened on the run up to a holiday weekend the consequences could have been even worse.

Plan B carried out two full customer invocations and was on standby for a further four customers. All invocations went perfectly and service was delivered to both customers within 30 minutes of them requesting their invocations.

Abdi Hersi commented that invoking the Plan B Service turned the incident into “the most enjoyable disaster ever”!

The incident highlighted a number of things worthy of note:

Firstly, and most obviously it illustrated that even with resilient facilities that are well protected, disasters do happen and the knock on effect can be significant. So it can happen to you!

Specifically, the incident highlights that the Burne House Exchange is a massive single point of failure for lots of services around the country, and even if you have multiple Internet connections from multiple suppliers (as one of our customers had) they can still end up terminating in the same BT exchange - or going along the same bit of BT fibre in the same BT duct - and you wont know about it until all your supposedly independent data lines get knocked out by a single BT failure. The lesson here is if you are buying independent data connections you will have to check exactly who your suppliers get their connections from and where exactly they go before you can be sure you have true independence for availability reasons.

We learned that for our customers, Email was the key application they wanted working in the event of a data connection outage and that they decided to invoke as soon as they knew the outage would be longer than 24 hours.

The incident also highlighted that when the length of the outage is uncertain, only a solution like Plan B’s that can be invoked with no effort within minutes as a fully working service is really fast enough and flexible enough to deliver value quickly enough to warrant taking the decision to invoke. A ‘build from back-up’ or ship-to-site solution would simply never have been able to provide an answer in these circumstances.

Make sure you have a Plan B.

Mar 09
PC Pro Magazine Recommend Plan B

The review can be found at:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/security-appliances/355855/plan-b-disaster-recovery

It is also repeated below:

Verdict

Plan B can ensure your business will be a success and not another sorry statistic in the event of a disaster

Review Date: 25 Feb 2010

Price when reviewed: £1,315 (£1,545 inc VAT)

UK-based Plan B aims to take the pain and expense out of disaster recovery by offering an affordable service for SMBs, which is simple to deploy and provides full off-site storage and recovery services. The company claims it can get your critical servers back online inside 30 minutes.

Plan B deploys an on-site appliance and uses agents to snapshot each protected Windows server to it. The appliance then uploads the snapshot to Plan B’s datacenter, where it creates a virtual machine (VM) from it.

Invoking disaster recovery for the SBS server example costs £400 and Plan B will fire up the remote VM, weave some DNS magic, and put all your services back online. Plan B can do this so quickly because it tests the VM at the earliest opportunity to make sure it will work when needed. The one-off charge includes full migration of the VM back to your server.

For testing, we used a Dell PowerEdge 2900 running SBS 2003 and the GoToMyPC corporate remote control client. On delivery, we connected the appliance to the network and used its web console to install an agent directly on the server. The agent is declared to the appliance, whereupon it takes a snapshot of the server. You have no control over what’s copied, since this is all handled remotely.

The completed snapshot is encrypted and uploaded to the remote VM. Once the appliance has completed the first snapshot, the agent regularly updates it with deltas that are then passed up the line. Our only complaint was a lack of agent-logging information. During the initial snapshot and upload phases, we had no real idea of what it was up to.

Plan B Disaster Recovery

The 80GB of data on our test server took a few days to upload and we wished we’d taken up Plan B’s offer of a USB drive for locally backing up the data first. This is included in the price. On delivery, you attach it to the appliance and Plan B initiates the snapshot copy to it. The drive is then sent to the remote site and its contents are encrypted.

To simulate a disaster we forcibly powered down our SBS server and phoned Plan B with cries of help. Less than 30 minutes later, the company called us back with the address details of the remote VM. We tested remote access using OWA and had no problems accessing multiple Exchange mailboxes where all mail was present and correct.

GoToMyPC was unaware that the entry in our portal for the SBS server was now a VM and we were able to gain full remote access to the server. We concluded that most users would be hard-pressed to spot that their services were running from a remote system.

Plan B is an elegant solution for disaster recovery that will appeal hugely to SMBs. It’s affordable, easy to deploy and, above all else, delivers when it really counts.

Author: Dave Mitchell