Karl Sideshow Notes & Cloud Tips

Today I’ll be joining Karl on his Cloud Services Podcast to talk a little about what has really made us successful at Own Web Now through the years. If all goes according to plan, we’ll talk a little more about the technology than business (because the business side of this is remarkably simple) when it comes to the cloud.

Here are a few concepts that are slightly more difficult to visualize so I will outline them here:

LiveArchive – Everything fails. Every time you read something covering the cloud you will undoubtedly read about stuff going down. That’s a given, there is no amount of marketing fluff that can cover it up. However, this is a problem that we solve with technology.

Each ExchangeDefender subscriber is enrolled in LiveArchive, an Exchange 2010 powered failover system that is always on. Because we scan all inbound and all outbound mail, we create a seamless copy of the message that gets delivered to our Exchange 2010 infrastructure spread across our data centers. This way when there is an emergency maintenance or downtime or a scheduled maintenance window smack in the middle of your critical business event, you can just open up a browser and open Outlook Web App from any PC or any mobile phone (yes, Microsoft has made OWA seamless across devices in 2010, no more “light” versions)

You can read more about it at ExchangeDefender LiveArchive. This feature is a part of our ExchangeDefender product, so it doesn’t matter if you have your own Exchange server or any other mail server for that matter – it will work.

Split MX Migration – There are a ton of ways to migrate between Exchange deployments – and nearly all of them suck. The Microsoft method will upload the mail from your Exchange server but once you setup your BPOS profile, it will download all that mail right back down. Other providers have different methods, all of which fail in one way or another – some only sync mail and forget about the calendars and contacts, others do it one way, some have a time restriction. Let’s face it, Exchange is an enterprise product that was not designed to be portable.

With ExchangeDefender, we have a seamless delivery protocol called Split MX Migration. You point your domains MX record at one of our ExchangeDefender servers and we simultaneously deliver mail to your old system and to the new Exchange 2010 mailboxes in our data centers. This way you don’t “lose” mail between the time you start the migration or decide to export mail… which leads me to the next component

PST Seeding – If you have a lot of users, you have a lot of mail. Uploading tons and tons of mail over a DSL or Cable connection found at most small businesses can take hours or days. It’s much easier to just dump it to a USB drive and overnight to us. What’s even more impressive is that our import speed on the server side is 7x faster than the Outlook MAPI/RPC. Can’t beat that.

Split Domains – With ExchangeDefender, you get the enterprise product. But not everyone needs an enterprise product. Or more importantly, not everyone is willing to pay for it. Well, we have two options.

For partners who have clients that need to control their costs, we can split the domain between Exchange and POP3/IMAP/Webmail/SSL hosting. The mailboxes on Exchange cost more (10 times more) than the regular mailboxes due to Microsoft licensing fees and the hardware requirements – but if the users aren’t going to be using SharePoint, Public Folders or shared calendars, should they be paying 10x more? Probably not. So we can fix that problem with Split Domains.

Some partners are washing their hands of the email infrastructure all together. We can help there too. In August of 2010, one of our partners will be launching a new Exchange 2010 offering focused on the consumer space (think Google Apps experience in self service and self management) at a far, far, far lower rate than even the BPOS. More details on that later though 🙂

FailPOP – Finally, as everything fails, sometimes ExchangeDefender LiveArchive isn’t the best solution. We’ve been involved in a ton of disaster scenarios with our partners and sometimes connectivity is an issue.

FailPOP is a built-in ExchangeDefender process that allows us to stand up a secure POP3 infrastructure in place of your existing server if you know you’ll be down for a while. This way mobile phones and laptops can be configured with a more permanent server on the Internet that allows for free collaboration without being tied to an Internet connection.

If you have any questions, please forward them to vlad@vladville.com. If you have a technical question as an Own Web Now partner, please use https://support.ownwebnow.com. If you’re not one, go to http://www.ownwebnow.com/partners and check us out.

Finally, register for Karl’s podcast http://dld.bz/k94T and listen to it free (in about ten minutes) or buy a subscription and listen to it anywhere anytime.