We’ve been hard at work at Carbonite, an OpenText company, to bring important new developments that our customers have been asking for, and which lay the groundwork for future enhancements as we continue building out our cyber resilience platform.
Specific to Carbonite Server backup, the following new capabilities are currently slated for release throughout the end of this year. Without further ado, let’s get into them and what makes them so exciting.
- Agent Auto-Configuration
To help reduce the level of manual effort, as well as systems expertise, required to set up backup jobs across an organization, we’re introducing agent auto-configuration templates. These templates can be pre-configured with job schedules, then automatically applied any time you have new endpoint devices to protect.
As an example, if you have a lot of servers and computers to back up, it can be a tedious process to set up backup schedules across each one. With the new auto-configuration templates, you’ll be able to simply pre-configure a backup schedule, designate which files or file structures to back up and when, and then automatically apply the same template across all the relevant devices in your environment, even as you pick up new devices or decommission old ones. Additionally, managed service provider (MSP) admins can use these templates when on-boarding new clients.
- Hyper-V Rapid VM Recovery
Rather than an entirely new feature, this enhancement is an expansion of existing capabilities. It allows a customer to spin up and recover a virtual machine within minutes. This is extremely beneficial in the case of a disaster scenario, such as when a business’ servers or other critical, backed up network devices go down. With the new, expanded functionality, admins can spin up a virtual machine in just minutes with the click of a button, thereby enabling access to whatever data or functionality is needed just as if the original server were still working as it was prior to the disruption. Effectively, it enables businesses to keep their operations going as normal, even as the relevant physical servers are repaired or replaced, and can then migrate that server back to its original location or a new one.
- New Netherlands Hosting for Carbonite Server
Later this year, we will be expanding our existing datacenter in the Netherlands to accommodate Carbonite Server backup vaults and better serve our partners and customers in European countries. The new datacenter will provide fast, in-region hosting as part of our global cyber resilience strategy. These changes will benefit two main groups: existing Europe-based partners and customers whose data was previously hosted in the U.K. datacenter, who may be impacted by Brexit; and existing and future partners and customers who are subject to data sovereignty laws that have stringent requirements on where, geographically, protected data can be physically stored. In addition, the expanded hosting capabilities provide a foundation that will enable us to expand our Carbonite product offerings in the region.
- Hourly Backups (with New, More User-Friendly Portal Interface)
In some cases, business critical systems house data that changes rapidly and must be up-to-date to ensure continuous operation. For such scenarios, a daily backup is often insufficient. The new hourly backup capability will allow admins to easily create multiple restore points throughout the day, reducing the risk of data loss in the event that they have some kind of outage and a backup recovery is necessary. Backup schedules remain customizable, so that only the servers that need to be backed up on such short intervals are affected. MSPs managing multiple, separate customer environments can also copy these schedules across sites, so there’s no need to individually create custom backup schedules for each customer if an existing schedule is appropriate.
- Offline Agent Deletion
Currently in the management portal, when deleting servers that no longer need to be backed up, it is necessary to delete the data first, then delete the server. Otherwise, backed up data associated with a decommissioned server remains in the backup set but without any markers to designate the previous association. This issue can make it hard to distinguish data from the old server (which can now be purged) from data you need to keep, often necessitating a call to our Support team to ensure only the desired data is purged from the system.
With our upcoming offline agent deletion enhancement, admins will no longer need to contact support to verify which datasets are to be removed. Instead, the backed up data will remain associated with the now-deleted server, so admins can easily identify and purge the correct data as needed, without contacting Support.
Keep an eye out for the official release announcements so you can start taking advantage of the new features as soon as they’re available.
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