We’ve been cloud-native since the beginning, offering VMware-powered virtual hosting for almost ten years. In fact, our very first EMC backend storage array is now sitting in the lobby of our Cheyenne headquarters.
Of course, we couldn’t stay stagnant with our cloud offerings (you’d notice if that old storage array was still powering your cloud, trust us). The hardware, software, and facilities powering the gBlock cloud have undergone a variety of upgrades over the past decade, and the latest set is big enough for us to dub it officially the gBlock Cloud 2.0.
So what’s new in the Green House Data cloud? Let’s dive into the benefits customers can receive when the migrate to this new and improved platform.
Here at Green House Data, our technicians are constantly working hard behind the scenes to improve the customer experience in our cloud products. We’ve recently completed a round of upgrades to bring you the latest features and bug fixes to our gBlock Cloud platform.
Here are some of the newest features that are available to you today, including improved web portal access, new disaster recovery features and interoperability with AWS and Azure, and more.
Backing up your enterprise data and applications is a no-brainer. Most everyone has experienced that moment of panic when a hardware failure sinks in and you realize the project you’ve been working on is never coming back. When we’re talking about an entire company’s IT infrastructure, an outage means dozens or hundreds of projects with hefty downtime costs.
You might have a backup plan in place, but backups are not disaster recovery (and disaster recovery is not ideal for backup, either). Backup is intended as a long-term, low cost solution for storing data, applications, configurations, etc. Disaster recovery is designed to get only the most critical portions of your IT infrastructure back online as fast as possible.
That means storage and bandwidth costs tend to be higher with DR, but recovery times are measured in minutes rather than hours or days. Let’s take a look at the other ways the two methods differ.
One of the questions that we are constantly asked is “How do I migrate my existing machines to the cloud?” Several vendors have answered this question by developing software solutions to aid in this process, but they can be very costly and complicated to implement. Fortunately, there is a simple and free method that has been adopted by practically all virtualization platforms: OVF.
As a busy sysadmin, finding the time to package up and transfer a virtual machine can be difficult enough, so the last thing you want is for the import to fail. Below are some best practices to avoid the most common issues we see when exporting OVF files.