Imaging has become one of the preferred methods to backup PCs today. Imaging is able to capture all of the data on a hard drive in a single process, making it a great choice to quickly backup PCs and servers. However, the technology lends itself well to many other capabilities – Including transferring data and applications to a new PC, as well as converting a PC hard drive into a virtual hard drive file to run under a virtual session on a server. Paragon Software has recognized those capabilities and now highlights those abilities in the latest release of their imaging product.

Paragon Software latest product, Paragon Backup and Recovery 10 Suite, was released on 11/17/09 and offers several new features that demonstrates the company’s expertise in the world of disk imaging products. The company has been offering backup and disk management tools since 1994 and has steadily evolved their product matrix to bring new capabilities to the market in a timely fashion. Paragon Backup and Recovery 10 Suite follows that precedent and brings innovative capabilities, such as virtual PC support and online backup to the backup market. The product comes in both 64 bit and 32 bit versions and is available for all flavors of Windows.

I downloaded both 32 bit and 64 bit versions for testing on a Lenovo T61p Notebook system running Windows 7 Ultimate (64Bit), a Toshiba Portege R-600 Notebook running Windows 7 Ultimate (32Bit), and a white box PC with an AMD Phenom CPU, running Windows Vista Home Edition.  All systems featured USB 2.0 ports (for use with an external USB hard drive) and gigabit Ethernet connections to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device.

I found installation to be straightforward, except for the requirement to input a product key and serial number – a long complex string of characters that could prove easy to transpose or enter incorrectly. Installers should just as copy and paste the key code and serial number from a registration e-mail that the company sends out upon purchase of the product. Installers can always get that information from a customer portal on Paragon’s website – When you purchase a Paragon product, you create an account on Paragon’s site, which then becomes the portal to download products and get license codes and product keys.

Launching the application brings up an attractive interface that is clearly aimed at making the product easy to use. First-time users can quickly identify how to perform backups, restore files or any other basic task, all without having to refer to a manual.  Large descriptive menu buttons make it easy to launch wizards that make backup, restoration, file selection, creating rescue media and building schedules relatively straightforward. A tabbed interface located on the left side allows users to drill down into some of the more advanced features, such as converting images to virtual hard drives or browsing existing images to copy individual files.

Most users will find using the “Smart Backup” option the way to go. It is very easy to use and offers a good level of customization during the definition process. Options let you target e-mails, media files, or documents, or manually select specific files. The product offers multiple options for the location of a backup files, including network drives, burn to DVD and store to any FTP site.

On the other hand, some users may be confused by the product’s virtual mode. Basically, all operations are “stored” and do not occur until you hit an “apply” button to activate the task. It seems unnecessary to make users operate the product in this fashion, but then again, it does protect neophytes from accidently executing operations that can affect their data files. Advanced users can forgo the “virtual mode” by changing the program’s preferences.

One very nifty feature is the product’s ability to convert an image into a virtual hard drive. That way, if you system fails altogether, you can run that image as a virtual hard drive on a system running desktop virtualization. That could prove to be a fast way to retrieve important data or run applications during a system disaster.

The product also offers a backup component that is loaded in the system tray, which handles automating the backup process using a technology the company calls “snapshot” – snapshots are basically use a static look at the current data on the hard drive to compare changes to previous images. When the application detects changes in the data on the hard drive by comparing snapshots, an incremental backup is executed.

Performance was adequate, I was able to back up the 70GB of data in about two hours and 15 minutes. Subsequent backups using the incremental setting only took a few minutes, depending upon how much information was changed on the hard drive.  Where Paragon Backup and Recovery 10 Suite really shines is with features such as the ability to backup, restore and convert virtual hard drives, as well as create WinPE bootable rescue media.

System builders may want to pay additional attention to Paragon Backup and Recovery 10 Suite, since the product could quickly become a sales add-on for new PCs, while traditional solution providers may want to add the product to their array of applications used to maintain PCs. Either way, Paragon Backup and Recovery 10 Suite proves to be a good product to sell to end users, while exposing those end users to the intricacies of backup and plant the seeds for new technologies.

By and large, being a partner of a large corporation means next to nothing these days. Customers are not interested in partners of companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, IBM and Oracle. These companies sell thousands of products and have thousands of partners. Instead, customers want to know what intellectual capital can partners bring to bear in terms of technology specializations.

At the same time, internal sales people inside these large companies are being trained to segment channel partners by technology specialization. At the end of the day, this means that channel partners that don’t have some sort of technology specialization that differentiates them are going to find themselves at the back of the line when it comes to being invited to participate in deals.

Oracle kicked off its efforts to add more technology specialties to its channel program last June. But now the company is making a concerted effort to drive channel partners towards embracing 31 different specializations that are aligned around Oracle applications, database and middleware technologies, as well as a handful of vertical industries.

For solution providers in the channel, the Oracle push around specializations is only the latest in a series of moves by big vendors to increasingly cut the wheat from the chaff in the channel.

Fortunately for solution providers in the channel, things are getting more complex by the moment. Virtualization has introduced a whole new layer of software that frequently makes the underlying physical infrastructure invisible to the applications that run on it. Application performance anomalies are increasing as the number of systems that each application touches increases exponentially. And with the rise of cloud computing, there are all kinds of potential performance issues as applications increasingly span multiple wide area networks. Finally, the whole process of rolling out and then managing an application across virtual infrastructure is about to become significantly more complex as virtual machines and the application workloads that ride on top of them start to dynamically move across the enterprise.

The good news is that there is now a raft of new offerings that together take on the challenges associated with application management. Those new offerings include:

*BlueStripe Software provides a set of tools that correlates events across both virtual and physical infrastructure to create a holistic view of the entire environment.

*dynaTrace offers a new approach to application management that continuously monitors application events so no one has to waste time trying to recreate anomalies.

*Apparent Networks has a tool that identifies the weakest network connections to any given cloud computing service.

*rPath has an application delivery management system tuned specifically for virtual server environments.

There are probably at least another dozen or so modern application and systems management tools out there that collectively can give solution providers in the channel both a strategic and tactical edge. After all, most IT organizations today are encumbered by legacy toolkits that are anywhere from three to 10 years old. The opportunity for solution providers is to show up with the latest toolkits that allows them o easily convince customers that their applications are going to be in much better hands with the solution provider than anything they could do themselves.

Data Security Tools: As the focus on security has shifted from the perimeter, solution providers are finding success with a wide range of security tools focused on securing data rather than access to the network.

Data Storage: No matter the state of the economy, demand for more storage space keeps growing. And until storage virtualization goes mainstream, there is still plenty of opportunity to sell storage arrays.

Business Intelligence: There are a lot of tools in this category, but the reason companies buy them is the same. After years of investing in packaged applications, customers are anxious to show value for those investments by presenting users with actionable information.

Smartphones: There’s not much money to be made on the sale of the smartphone itself. But a new generation of mobile applications is creating opportunity for the channel.

Cloud Computing: It’s still early days as far as the channel is concerned. But the convergence of cloud computing and managed services does create a lower cost model for delivering IT services.

802.11n Wireless Networks: Increased bandwidth, lower costs and fewer headaches are a combination that most customers can’t ignore no matter how bad the economy is.

Appliance Consolidation: All those devices at the edge of the network are now ripe for consolidation as customers have become concerned about the total cost of managing them all.

Virtualization Sprawl: In the back half of the year, customers have discovered that not only do they need virtual machine management tools, but that left to their own devices virtual machines will suck up all the memory they can find unless properly managed.

Application Acceleration: Short of a full network upgrade, the best thing for a slow network is a set of application acceleration appliances that offload high bandwidth or low latency applications.

Desktop Virtualization: Starting with a conversation about Windows 7 and aging hardware, solution providers are starting to discover that customers are rethinking their entire approach to managing the desktop.

Even in the worst of times, there is always opportunity in the channel if you just know where to look.

Almost every major wireless provider (except Sprint) has a different plan for personal and a business use. I’d assume there is a reason for this like maybe milking the business user with specific surcharges like that of the exchange surcharge. Let’s do a quick comparison of the 4 leading wireless carriers, where we will use their personal plan as a baseline to get overall fees on business plans.

Comparison of prices between major carriers., where cheapest Business and Personal plans were selected

Gmail, Yahoo, and other public facing email services assumed they serve primarily the consumer. This is reinforced by the fact that each service usually has an entirely different entry point for business accounts. Case in point, Google has “Gmail for Business”, which has different tiered plans with features that the consumer versions don’t have (like shared contacts).

For the business, the exchange surcharge, even if it adds up to “thousands” at the end of the year, is a cost of doing business. It will be absorbed and passed to the customer’s cost just like it has always been.

The only people who are haggard about these “new and improved” exchange fees are consumers who will need to pay the ability to connect their personal phones to the corporate email servers. They use their phones because most likely then not they either don’t qualify for a company phone or don’t like the one they already have.

In general upgrade your sales team to the newest phones if they add to the efficiency of your team and worry not about the fees involved. Instead just add the difference to your overhead and price accordingly and if you’re a consumer – save your receipts for your tax person in April.

While moving to open source software may seem to be a most cost effective solution, it may not entirely be so when you start to look at the additional cost for external support, security consulting and other cost that are associated with an open source platform but are not core to the product.

Here at the Channel Tech Center we are proponent’s of all open source software (and we even run on it), but we definitely want to let every one know, there is a lot to consider before you go open.

Open source solutions usually are more then one open source product (think plug-ins), each having different licensing, update and support models. Making things more murky, some of these add-on products have commercial license models that business must purchase.

It becomes important to understand the license your solution uses and how that can affect your business. Some license insists that you give any code that you change (to improve or change the open source code for your specific needs) back to the community. This makes it hard to keep a competitive advantage secret. While other licenses let you keep code edits to yourself.

Open source software more often then not is not production ready and needs a lot of customization for your specific needs. If you have an in house development staff, this may not be much of an issue, but if not, you better budget out for your enhancements, support, and general customizations.

If you choose to hire permanent development and support staff, hiring a developer or two (from $60k – $90k plus benefits) may be a surprise that you just didn’t count on.

Of course you could always outsource development using services such as odesk.com, where developers from all over the world bid on your work for as low as $5 an hour, but beware of time zone differences and the general premise of “you get what you pay for”. Even then, you will need to invest substantially more then is often associated with an open source solution.

So, do you think that open source software is ready for prime time as company solutions? Let us know in the comments.

With each bottle of methanol going for ¥3,150, or US$35, this introduces a steep increase to the cost of recharging your batteries (rechargeable battery camera kits currently cost as low as US$40). For early adopters looking into larger scale applications of green energy generators this new fuel source will really show the-green-talkers from the-green-walkers, surely it’ll “separate the boys from the men”, and will prove who the true conservationist believers are.

The going price for a gallon of clean Methanol (according to Wiki answers a gallon is 3.78 liters – where 1 Liter of Methanol is worth $36) is US$136 whereas a gallon of dirty Gasoline (as of 10/19) is $2.57. That is some significant difference (that maybe some green tax loop holes can absorb).

So how much is it worth to the bottom line to be green? Now we have to keep in mind, as Martine Wilson from PC World points out in regard to Toshiba’s Dynario, that as these technologies become prevalent and volume increases, prices should decrease. Basically market forces will drive the price of Methanol down as supply decreases… and demand increases? No, wait that won’t work.

Well whatever, I’m sure the introduction of a new fuel source always brings down the value of that source (as history as shown us – right?)

So says Gartner analyst Caroll Rozwell in saying said what has on every cube-dwellers mind since the advent of Facebook, “Banning access to social media from the corporate network is futile”.

A quick walk around the office will show salespeople, IT folk, and Mailroom personnel Linking up, Poking others, singing a twit or two, and in general staying in their space

As information becomes prevalent and real world attempts, such as China’s Firewall, show that blocking access to information is never bullet-proof, people in IT and management are starting to ask the big questions like “why are we blocking this again?”.

The Gartner analyst, speaking at their Miami “Gartner Symposium” (as Reported by Reuters), have suggested into looking at ways that employers can use social networks to understand their employees and see who there undiscovered diamonds are.

As they pitched the notion that most of management is “flying blind” in understanding their workflows and who is actually the most influential people in their corporation (in my humble opinion it’s always the secretaries), they think social networks can show who has what it takes to get a job done.

Ok, so I am in. That is to say, I’m in Linked-In, Facebook, MySpace, and among twenty other social networking sites and I have yet to “see” who has the gusto of what it takes to get a project done, a product launched, or in general is adept at anything other then telling me what they are doing at the very moment they are doing it.

So, where is this wealth of information that will make my company understand the business intelligence aspect of social networks and have the CIO proclaim that all that is social is green lighted? We’ll I think that this is in the hands of not the users but of the actual networks themselves. Maybe the question is, what will they do with the data that will make my job as a manager easier to detect the gems from the coal?

Maybe we are looking at too broad a scope maybe a company specific social network (such as Yammer.com and a couple of others provide) is the solution. If you have an experience, good or bad, about using social networks at the workplace environments I’d like to know. Please leave a message in the comment area.

What that means on a practical level is not only our customers looking for help in terms of how to leverage technology in their business; they also want hands-on help in terms of setting up specific business processes.

This represents a significant evolution of the channel in that rather than just reselling and deploying products, solution providers are increasingly being asked to function as business consultants. Customers still expect their solution provider to find, recommend and acquire products for them, but as part of that process they also want solution providers to tell them what to do with those products and technologies.

To facilitate this evolution we’re starting to see the emergence of new business process management (BPM) platforms that help automate a specific business task. These platforms range from comparatively simple middleware platforms to full-fledged applications that can be easily customized. Some of the BPM platforms are hardwired to automate a limited number of processes, while others are more open ended systems focused on the workflow dynamics between various individuals. And like all software these days, some of it can be delivered on premise while other elements are best delivered via the cloud.

What matters here is that BPM creates an opportunity for solution providers, and by extension their customers, to stop thinking in terms of application silos. Any end-to-end business process that is worth automating is going to need to touch anywhere from five to 20 or more applications. The real value that solution providers bring to the equation is understanding the intricacies associated with any given business process and the application code wrapped around them.

Acquiring that level of business process knowledge is not easy, but once it’s accomplished no vendor will ever dare doubt the value of a solution provider again. After all, whoever owns the business process also by extentsion owns the customer.

What does this mean to the business user? Well lots! Many internal small to mid sized business portals in addition to many commercial websites are hosted on one of these three platforms. Now you can cut your development expenditures and increase efficiency (and tracking capabilities) by using the pre-made plug-in to connect to a local installation of OpenSSO.

Open SSO can connect to existing directories as well such as LDAP, Active Directory, and of course, Sun Directory, so you don’t have to recreate your user base in multiple data stores – which is also helpful in streamlining your support structures.

Now if you have multiple sites internally or you’re a commercial sites network, you can give your users the ease of logging in once as your surf from site to site.

Of course I have to mention that Wordpress MU has had single sign on built in for some time, but the ability to easily carry over credentials from your site to your sister or partner site could be game changing.

Have you played with OpenSSO lately? Leave me a comment with your experiences.