Chris Reid’s Blog

I like companies who stand behind there products. When something goes wrong, they do their best to make it right. The problem is when something goes wrong with a pay for usage cloud app it’s the consumer on the hook.

I use my Windows Home server for onsite backup at home. If works great, however if disaster hits the building and for some reason the the house vanishes my backups are gone too.

In September I signed up for an online backup application. This company sold the backup software for a license fee and charged a monthly reoccurring amount to enable the software’s premium features. The cloud based storage was provided by Amazon S3, billed separately.

Everything was going well until February when my ISP notified me I was exceeding my bandwidth usage. I couldn’t figure out how this was possible until I checked my usage on my S3 account.

Wow, I was on the hook for way more then the $12 a month my online backup typically cost. Investigation revealed the cause was a backup software point release I installed. There was one new feature that caused my AntiVirus software to scan the online backups

“Native filesystem support on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 2003 and 2008”

I don’t dedicate much time to maintaining my home computer. I keep the software up to date, and I expect it to just work. I don’t have time to UAT point releases. This is a good reminder that fixed price services are typically better.

I’ve now switched to Carbonite, I purchased a two year subscription for $44.95 US. The price is fixed, and because Carbonite is paying for the bandwidth on their end it’s in their interest to ensure my online backups are not scanned by AntiVirus.

Whenever possible we use Microsoft software internally. We have been using VMware for our virtualization since 2002. I’ve looked at Microsoft virtualization software as it’s been released over the years and with the availability of Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager it’s time to make the switch.

I’ve been testing Hyper-V since summer 2008 with our long delayed Exchange 2007 server. The results have been great, and now that our Exchange 2007 is live there’s no reason to go back.

Benefits

- It just works like it should

- Microsoft software, so it fits in the Microsoft software ecosystem with all it’s goodness (management, updates, support, etc.)

Downsides

- Hyper-V installs on our 9th generation Dell Severs, but it won’t install on 8th generation servers because they don’t support Intel VT. This really isn’t a big deal because this impacts a single branch office server and Virtual Server will do the job.

Our production and CRM 4 development virtual machines will be converted to Hyper-V, an easy process thanks to Virtual Machine manager.

I’m also planning to eliminate most of our physical servers, managing virtual machines is much easier.