There are many different certifications out there today, but what do they all really mean?
Are you familiar with SAS 70 or SSAE 16? SAS 70 was originally intended to access financial practices, not necessarily data center operations. In June 2011, SAS 70 was replaced by the Statement of Standards for Attestation Engagements, also called SSAE 16. The main difference is that the SSAE 16 reporting methodology requires the organization’s leadership to sign an “Attestation” verifying the existence and effectiveness of the organization’s financial practices. INetU has SSAE 16 Type II, and ISAE 3402 is the international equivalent.
In addition to SSAE 16, there are some new players to the game. Three reports have been established, titled Service Organization Control (SOC) reports. While SOC 1′s primary concern is still over the financial practices and is equivalent to SSAE 16, SOC 2 came around as a game changer!
SOC 2 measures and reports on a service organizations controls. Finally, an audit designed around specific requirements of data center operations, such as security. SOC 2 reports on the organization’s operational controls and can be obtained in one or more of the following categories: Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, or Privacy. INetU has SOC 2. 
So what could be better than SOC 2? Well SOC 3 of course! SOC 3 is public availability of SOC 2. It is the highest level you can obtain. SOC 3 is a third party certification that verifies SOC 2 was completed and summarizes the contents of that report for public consumption. INetU has SOC 3.
Seeing new certifications come out into the technology industry is great news for you! It means more proactive steps on keeping your data protected and an additional measure of trust when evaluating a new vendor. If you have any more questions on the different types of certifications, please leave a comment below. I’ll be happy to reply! Cheers!
INetU offers a new backup solution! Restore24, a full-service solution provided by INetU, delivers nothing less than peace of mind. Restore24 eliminates your risk of losing important information. We’ll keep your data safe so if disaster strikes, your system will be up and running much faster, saving you valuable time and money.
Restore24 engineers are available 24 hours of the day to implement your recovery needs. They can customize your backup and recovery solutions to meet your recovery point and time objectives, perform restores, and answer any of your Restore24 questions!
Build & Test! It’s not enough to simply implement a backup system; the system must be continually tested and monitored. Restore24 engineers perform daily automated test restores on your environment to ensure our system executes without any imperfections. Daily test restores makes sure your data is always available and provides you the comfort of knowing it works! Restore24 is fully managed by INetU, meaning you don’t have to do anything. Once you request a restore, engineers will start restoring your data immediately. Restore24 also provides the client the flexibility to perform on-demand backups and restores themselves.
While developing Restore24 our main objectives were to increase the reliability and performance from our old backup system – and we accomplished this! At INetU we are committed to providing the most up to date solutions for all of our clients.
While there are many new changes in VMWare ESXi 5.0, like Image Builder, Auto Deploy/Central Management, Firewall Changes, USB 3 Support and hardware upgrades, Today I’m going to highlight Cluster HA.
In vCenter 5.0 VMware Cluster HA functionality has been fully revamped. The clunky Automated Availability Manager (AAM) used in 4.X and below is now replaced by Fault Domain Manager (FDM). AAM had many quirks and limitations some of them being that it only used the management interface as the heartbeat communication for nodes in the cluster. Troubleshooting it when it broke was a headache because it wrote too many log files all over the place. AAM could also only have 5 cluster masters which were elected when the first 5 ESXi hosts joined the cluster, this could not be exceeded and if the hosts needed to change it had to be done manually via configuration files. This caveat would need to be taken into consideration in your infrastructure design so that all of the masters didn’t reside in the same enclosure, DC, running of the same power, etc…
FDM is far more resilient to host failures and isolations. It has a new cluster master election process which assigns a single node as the cluster master; if that node dies any node inside cluster can rerun the election process and assign a new master inside the cluster. If host isolation occurs the isolated hosts can function on their own and elect a new master. Once the hosts can communicate with one another and there are multiple masters present in the cluster the election process will begin and a single master will be elected once again. FDM now uses the management interfaces as a heartbeat but also the storage network (datastore) for heart beat communication. If you bring down your management switches for your ESXi servers for maintenance/failure the cluster can still communicate on the storage network not causing any re-election inside the cluster or any sort of freak out. FDM also has a single log file (/var/log/fdm.log) for troubleshooting and supports syslog for centralized log gathering and possible monitoring functionality. FDM is exciting news for VMware admins and end users alike!
I hope that you find the write ups on cluster HA and vCenter Storage helpful. If you’d like more information on any new vCenter features please comment below.
While there are many new changes in VMWare ESXi 5.0, like Image Builder, Auto Deploy/Central Management, Firewall Changes, USB 3 Support and hardware upgrades, Today I’m going to highlight Storage DRS and Profile Driven Storage.
With vCenter 5.0 comes the introduction of Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS) and Profile Driven Storage. It is common practice to implement standard VMware DRS inside your VMware cluster one would load balance your VMs (virtual machines) based upon CPU and Memory usage. The new feature within vCenter 5.0, SDRS, uses the same ideology but at the vSphere storage level.
SDRS monitors datastore capacity and disk latency metrics and will Storage vMotion VMs to a better suited storage (datastore’s). This reduces administrative overhead for the VMware admin. It will help mitigate situations where VMs run out of space and get paused or are running poorly due to insanely high disk latency on the disk subsystem.
Profile Driven Storage is another slick new feature that allows you to specify Storage SLAs on a VM level to ensure that performance is never impacted. vSphere APIs for Array Awareness (VASA) integrates with the underlying disk array and allows vCenter to understand the type of disk groups and disk tiers that are available to the host. vCenter will work with the array on moving the VM to the appropriate physical spindles or SSDs using SvMotion after it has been configured in the Storage Profile. If VASA is not available for your array you can manually configure your tiered storage by using different datastores for different tiers (e.g. EMC01-SSDs-DG#12).
SDRS and Profile Driven Storage combined with VASA will help in ensuring constant storage performance for mission critical VMs. Stayed tuned to www.blog.inetu.net for the next highlighted feature of vCenter/ESXi 5.0.
Are you the one with all the ideas, but you feel limited by the options that are available? An API may be the way to set your creativity free. An API is a secure application programing interface (API).
It’s the power and flexibility of APIs on the internet that have enabled businesses around the world to react quickly to ever-changing needs and make their services stand out in the crowd. Many businesses gather information (such as weather forecasts, stock prices, vendor services, etc.) from multiple sources and systems, and aggregate them to make critical decisions. The information important to you might be weather forecasts, stock prices, new vendor services, or even status updates from you mother’s Facebook page.
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