There are a lot of organizations who are rethinking some basic concepts in Information Technology. One of these concepts is that you need to own, duplicate and even replicate user data between each of your sites so that you can have roaming profiles in Windows and mobile home directories in Mac OS X. For organizations with a large number of labs and users who roam between them, these challenges, which have dominated the infrastructure side of IT have been cumbersome for the past 15 to 20 years. But let’s rethink the “why.”

If you have labs, common in K12 and Higher Education but not so common in the corporate world, you need network home folders on the Mac OS X side, or its sister, portable home directories. On the Windows side, you need folder redirection. But a growing number of education environments are practicing the art of the one-to-one deployment, which strongly resembles what can be seen in the corporate world.

Between the big iron, massive SANs attached to the core switches licensing for DFS heads and the like, it can all get cost prohibitive. But we still do it because we think we need our data replicated. And some of us do. But one thing that we often say is that this data is not a backup. So if it isn’t a backup then how do we back these systems up. And if we do need to back these systems up then why are we also performing a layer of redundant synchronization? Does all of this result in 3 or 4 copies of the data, all in a from that cannot be reduplicated?

The end of the Xserve is nigh, and now for something completely different?

Awhile back, someone told me that you could back an unlimited amount of data up to the cloud for a price that was so cheap that I was stunned. There were a couple of products that I reviewed: CrashPlan and Backblaze. Both are pretty darn awesome. But the bandwidth to back 3,000 users up to someone else’s cloud can become pretty darn cost prohibitive. Enter CrashPlan Pro: you can host that cloud in your own location, or in multiple locations if you have the need to do so, and all on relatively inexpensive hardware, either leveraging the hardware that you already own or even the CrashPlan Pro appliances, rack mountable goodness that scales to store up to 72TB of data per unit, to store data that gets deduplicated before it gets copied to the device over the wire, providing substantial storage savings, not to mention reduced congestion on your wire (or wireless).

And to top it all off, CrashPlan Pro offers extensibility in the form of a REST-based API that allows building that which you may need but which the developers have not yet though (or more likely had time) to build. The API actually makes CrashPlan Pro a possible destination for Final Cut, amongst other things.

Oh, and did we mention the client can run on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris?!?!

318 partners with a number of vendors to help you rethink your IT conundrum, leveraging the best advances of today and tomorrow. We are pleased to add CrashPlan as our latest, in a long list of valued partners. Contact your 318 Professional Services Manager, or sales@318.com now for more information.