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C Infinity Hiring – fantastic opportunities

admin — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:39:54 +0000

If you have a passionate interest in “Cloud” and online services, if you think you can bring something to our team – send send us your cv!

We are looking to build our sales team, and if you think you have what it takes to drives high volume hosted managed services and “cloud infrastructure” sales with high calibre customers, then let us know.

If you are in IT and have experience in cloud and/or hosting. If you eat and sleep IT then let us know

info@cinfinity.ie

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A world cup success for C Infinity connected online backup

Caitriona — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:34:07 +0000

I am always amazed and delighted to hear customer stories, but this was a score!

An online backup customer of ours, who is based in the UK, returned from South Africa a very happy person. While at the world cup he met an old business acquaintance and was introduced to a new prospect who he was able to wow with a presentation from his laptop that he left in London! He recovered the presentation using connected secure access, and managed to fit a business meeting into his trip!

So England may not have got their result, but he may well have!

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A busy week at Epicenter 2010

Gavin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:38:52 +0000

Last week we attended Epicenter 2010 held at Trinity College in Dublin. It was a great opportunity for us to meet some really talented software developers.

Epicenter allowed us to get a better understanding of what software developer needs were when it came to SaaS hosting but also with data protection including encryption and remote data backups.

Barrry Alistair & Caitriona Lynch.

A big thanks to Barry Alistair from Irishdev.com who did a brilliant job with organising the event but also for looking after our team throughout the week.

Photo by Craig Murphy

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Apple iPad up for grabs at epicenter

Caitriona — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 13:18:06 +0000

C infinity, saas hosting experts, are proud to sponsor and speak at epicenter this week at Trinity College.

Come along and meet some of our team who will be available to discuss our services and how it could help you. We have an Apple iPad to give away so meet us for a chat and see how you could be the lucky winner of the iPad.

Dont forget, if you develop an apps we can host it!

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How Often Should I Backup My Data

Gavin — Tue, 11 May 2010 12:34:34 +0000

Whenever we take on a new client we often get asked how often should I backup my data? Although we treat every client different due to their business requirements the answer for this question is usually the same, as often as possible.
Why you should backup as often as possible

Let’s say, for an example, you perform one nightly backup of your data after business hours. The next day at 4pm your server decides to crash wiping all the business data but you have a backup of the previous night so everything is ok right? Nope it’s not and here is why: if you have to roll back to a previous day’s backup you have just lost full days’ worth of work. Depending on your business, this could be a lot of lost revenue.

Performing multiple backups throughout the day gives you the opportunity to roll back your business to a specific point in time, usually within a matter of minutes. If your business is performing manual backups then it will be difficult to perform multiple backups throughout the day. This is why you’ll need an automated backup solution.

Our server backup service is not only fully automated but it has the ability to perform backups of your server every 15 minutes (continuous backups). When disaster does strike you’ll have multiple restore points to choose from.

Will multiple backups cost more?

We do know of other backup providers that charge extra for performing multiple backups and also for their data retention rates. This can grow very fast due to the design of their backup system. A number of our new customers have come forward to complain about this practice and have even been suspected that we’ll do the same; We certainly do not.

As our backup service performs incremental backups, only the changes to your data is backed up, which, depending on your business, can be very small. Our backup system can perform 96 backups per day without additional charges on your account. This is because you get billed for monthly storage rates, not daily.

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A Pathway to Software-as-a-Service

Aidan — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:45:34 +0000

The benefits of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) are very appealing to both service providers and consumers. Code management and support are easier. Services can be instantly subscribed to as and when required, with no need for more on-premises servers to be installed.

Investing or developing a SaaS service can prove to be a challenge for vendors with an existing traditional client-server on-premises application. Small companies find it hard to raise the necessary fund to rewrite their application. That made is even more challenging in a recession. Larger companies have too much momentum and are slow to change direction to a web based solution. Start-up companies are able to adopt this revolutionary service delivery model much more quickly.

So does this mean that companies who have an existing solution are left out of the game until they come up with the funding to redevelop their application?

We recently worked with a small Irish company who had a traditional application. They wanted to move to a SaaS deliver model but had limited budget and time to redevelop their application. They asked us if we could suggest a way forward. The key was that they could make a couple of minor changes to their application to make it a multi-tenant solution. That would allow many people to securely and reliably use a single installation.

We put together a pilot system and tested the concept. It worked very well. The decision was made to deploy a production system. I spent a few hours consulting with the client and by lunchtime we had designed and deployed a solution that was suitable for their needs. The application could be “deployed” to a client in a matter of minutes with no new hardware or software. Clients could securely access the application from anywhere, and were no longer tied to their office. It was a hit!

Sure, some web purists will argue that this is not true SaaS. It is not a web application. However, try telling the owner of the application and their customers that they aren’t getting the same benefits. Eventually, they will develop a true web alternative. But thanks to the solution we deployed, they don’t have to hurry. Their customers are getting the benefits of SaaS right now.

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Volcanic ash doesnt stop me when I’m Connected!

Caitriona — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:41:05 +0000

I just received a wonderful phonecall from one of our customers recounting their experience over the past week in the midst of the volcanic ash disruptions.

After being away in France on a personal break they were due for a meeting in London. The only issue was the lack of flights to get them home to collect their laptop and suit! In typical fashion the only copy of their meeting documents was on their laptop with on the company server (sound familiar?).

Thankfully their laptop was backed up with C Infinity Connected so our customer was able to go online using myroam, recover a copy securely to another laptop, and get across the tunnel to London in time for their meeting. I never asked about the suit!

With support for Mac and Windows 7, Connected really is a compelling online backup service.

If you would like more information about our data backup service do hesitate to contact us.

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More Backup Storage Added Without Downtime

Gavin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:35:49 +0000

One of the great things I like about our backup infrastructure is how we can add extra storage without the need of shutting down the service. It can be scaled to what we need and when we need it without interrupting any of our customer’s backups.

I’ve recently dealt with the daunting task (or so I first thought) of adding a lot of extra storage space for our backup service, a mission critical service that our customers heavily rely on for their disaster recovery. Fortunately it wasn’t a case of shutting down the servers, slapping in a few hard drives into our SAN and starting the server’s again, leaving a risk of customers experiencing downtime with their data backups.

Thankfully, because we replicate backups across 3 different storage systems we have the ability to bring down one system without interrupting customer backups. Once one system is offline the extra storage was added and merged into the existing space, a procedure that took hours to complete. Once completed the system was brought back online and started to automatically receive replicated data from the other two systems. This procedure was repeated on the 2nd system and then the 3rd.

We completed a full upgrade to our storage vaults over a week period and within this time-frame we never missed a single customer’s backup.

You gotta love data replication!

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EuroCloud UK Event – How ISVs Make the Transition to SaaS

Gavin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:24:40 +0000

This month we will be attending and speaking at the EuroCloud UK Event, How ISVs Make the Transition to SaaS. Our Systems Architect and Infrastructure Manager, Aidan Finn, will be discussing our SaaS operations and customer relations.

The event will be held on Thursday 18th March 2010 at SAP UK Headquarters in Feltham. You can read more about the event and book online by clicking here.

What is EuroCloud?

EuroCloud is a European network of local SaaS and cloud computing communities, each established to encourage and promote the interests and benefits of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing within their own countries and across Europe. You can read more about them at their official website.

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Secure Online Backup for Windows 7

Aidan — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:45:03 +0000

C Infinity is happy to announce support for our Connected secure online backup service on Windows 7.

Windows 7 has been a massive success as a desktop operating system at home, in the small business and in the enterprise. Early adoption rates have been high and more widespread than expected. It features solutions that make it a great desktop and branch office platform. And it’s those very scenarios that our Connected backup service targets.

Roaming laptops rarely have access to an infrastructure that allows them to back up the valuable business data that is stored on them. Very often they are in remote locations, used by sales representatives or customer service agents who rarely get back to the office. The data on the machines cannot be lost but how can that data be backed up?

Windows 7 features technology that allows companies to remove servers from the branch office. That reduces costs but also means that there can very well be data stored on those desktop or laptop computers in that office. It won’t necessarily get backed up by internal systems.

With C Infinity’s Connected backup service you can securely back up those machines over the Internet. Connected identifies the blocks within files that have been changed and targets them to be backed up. Before that happens, duplicate blocks are tracked and wasted effort is eliminated. That duplication isn’t sent over the wire. Some files, Outlook PST files for example, are further optimised. The remaining data is compressed and then encrypted using AES. At this point the data is uploaded to the redundant data stores in C Infinity. Your data stays encrypted until you recover it. That means only you can access your data. It never leaves the jurisdiction of Ireland and our data protection laws because we are an Irish company, using a physically secure Irish data centre located in Dublin.

How well does it all perform? I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now. When we completed the upgrade of our service I installed the agent from the web site. It is a simple next-next-next installation. The agent scans the file system. Policies can be set up to target particular files and folders from the administrators online web console. Users can target files. My PC is backing up My Documents, my Internet favourites, my Outlook data and a few other bits and pieces. It ran away and backed up everything. I was curious to see what would happen on subsequent backups.

As I expected, my machine automatically runs backup jobs in a pre-defined time window every day. I powered up my machine this morning and was greeted by a status update not long afterwards.

487.4MB of files had changes. However, once the optimisations were done there were only 3.5MB of changed file system blocks that were not duplicated. These were compressed down to 1.2MB. This was encrypted using AES and then sent up to our redundant and replicating stores in the data centre.

Now I can recover any file I want within my retention window. Sure, I might have Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) running locally or even use Windows Backup and Restore to back up the laptop to a USB disk. USB disks aren’t necessarily the most reliable solution and that requires manual work for me to (a) to remember to do it and (b) do it. VSS is great to recover a file that might have changed on the laptop recently. But Connected gives me a secure central store. If I lose my laptop or it breaks then I can restore my data onto another machine without any delay.

Check out our secure Connected online backup service for desktops and laptop as well as our Livevault service for servers and contact us if you have any questions.

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