[Technical] Sonasoft?

[Con Zymaris]

On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 04:48:18PM +1000, Clark, Ian C wrote:
>  
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au 
> > I'm not normally in the habit of spruiking our own products, 
> > but if you need data/document snapshotting and revisioning, 
> > so that you can recover any version of any document, dating 
> > back months or years:
> > 
> >  http://www.cybersource.com.au/product/datasafe/
> 
> Hi Con,
> 
> People do need to be aware of two issues:
> 
> 1. It won't back up open files, which other products, such as the
> inbuilt NTBackup utility, can do.

Does anyone know why Windows still has this problem with open files and
backups? This has never been an issue on other platforms, like Linux,
and you don't need special 'shims' to work around backup issues with
Microsoft's SQL Server and Exchange.

> 
> 2. It won't back up a live database like SQL Server or Exchange.

This is correct, but that's not its purpose. It's a document and data
file revisioning/snapshotting tool.

> 
> The rest of it looks pretty good though, and the other product, the
> replicator, looks useful for keeping a Linux server ready as a "spare
> tyre" ...

It certainly does the trick. 

It also demonstrates what I see as an advantage of having Linux as your
base server platform. That is, you get to introduce replication for
whole servers (and thus better business/school IT availability) without
having to spend a lot of money on expensive softare to do so.

To give you an idea, our normal deployment for a business of 25 or so
users is three servers (one file/print/SQL/messaing, one replicator and
one file-system snapshotting), with all hardware, software and 
installation coming in at under $10k. 

By comparisons, our costings research for software which will allow you
to perform backups on SQL Server and Exchange shows that you need $5k 
for that software per server alone.

-- 
___________________________________________________________________________
Con Zymaris <conz at cyber.com.au> Level 4, 10 Queen St, Melbourne, Australia 
Cybersource: Australia's Leading Linux and Open Source Solutions Company 
Web: http://www.cyber.com.au/  Phone: 03 9621 2377   Fax: 03 9621 2477