What’s left of the cloud after it’s done raining?

A close personal and professional friend of mine and OWN’s apparently made a terrible business partnership decision. Naturally, I promptly offered a swift kick in the balls because your friends should always be there to kick you when you’re down so you never let it happen again.

For the past two days, a small portion of our friends client base had been seeing the screen to the right. It sucks. But as these things go, the CEO apologized, refunds have been issued and hopefully the business goes on.

My heart goes out to them on this, disasters suck… but..

The one thing…

The one thing I have learned in the past 12 years of managing Exchange is that Microsoft will never, EVER, make one that is capable of being fault tollerant. Never gonna happen. We’re getting as much unpredictable crap with 2010 as we’ve gotten with 5.5 and every version in between. Such is the nature of the mail servers, throw enough crap at them and they will go down on their knees.

This in no small part is why ExchangeDefender exists.

One thing I know as a cloud provider is that my stuff will eventually crash. It has in the past, it will in the future.

One of key things behind ExchangeDefender is LiveArchive, a realtime business continuity solution based on Exchange 2007. Not on Bubba’s Pretty Good ASP Webmail.

As we process inbound and outbound mail through ExchangeDefender, we create a copy. One goes to the recipient, one gets copied to your ExchangeDefender LiveArchive enterprise network in our data centers.

When, not if, your Exchange server goes down you just open up our OWA and continue working in realtime, with your same identity and email address. Even same login and password. Everything works – calendars, notes, reminders, and you have a FREE year worth of your email that was sent and received – not just a few messages since you’ve crashed.

This, in no small part, is why even people that hate the cloud work with Own Web Now and use ExchangeDefender. Certain CPA’s. We even provide LiveArchive with our Exchange hosting. Yes, the same clustered Exchange 2007 we offer for resale comes with ExchangeDefender and gets you a full year of free business continuity. Why? Because if we have ever leaned anything in our experience is that stuff WILL go down.

And we do it for free. We’ve covered people during migrations, when servers were down for a few days, even our partners non-profit who had their server go down and couldn’t afford a new one – they worked through LiveArchive for over 2 months.

This is the KEY aspect of providing stuff in the cloud – who has your back? Can you trust that the specs are what they are? Maybe.. But can you trust the odds that two separate server infrastructures won’t go down?

When it does, you can continue working. All you gotta do is drop me an email. If you want to check it out, vlad@ownwebnow.com is where you can get it from me for free.