Announcing the Redstor Education forums

Redstor are pleased to announce 2 dates for the northern and southern forums aimed at Education IT service providers and Local Authorities. We will be confirming the venues and the agenda in due course so watch this space! At these forums, we will be covering a whole raft of topics including remote backup, centralised remote device management, laptop encryption and e-safety. At a time when school budgets are being squeezed and in the unknown, it's key that Education IT service providers are offering proactive and relevant services to their schools. It's also key that they are seen to be offering value as the competition for school's business increases.

Simplify data management and control storage costs

Here at Redstor, we currently manage in excess of 1PB of data as part of delivering our suite of cloud services, from Exchange Backup to Laptop Encryption and Online Storage . Through our own experiences of managing and maintaining an environment of this scale, we are acutely aware of the specific challenges this can present around storage management and storage optimisation. We have also worked on upwards of 2,000 customer storage and backup projects throughout our 13 years of existence and so have width and depth of knowledge in this area which is unrivalled.

As part of our commitment to deliver solutions that address customers' challenges, we are working with F5 around their ARX solution. This enables organisations to take charge of data growth and implement smarter storage optimisation. F5 ARX file virtualisation gives businesses new flexibility in how they manage their file storage. ARX solutions reduce the complexity of file storage environments and eliminate the operational disruption caused by moving data, enabling companies to boost efficiency and reduce storage costs.

The headline figures are that you can:

- Lower spending on disk capacity by 50-80%

- Reduce backup infrastructure costs and achieve 50-80% faster backup times

- Gain better use of your most expensive storage tier

- Receive more flexibility to deal with massive storage growth

Redstor are equipped with a series of solutions from Storage Management to Online server backup and device management , please call our Reading office on +44 118 951 5200.

Redstor and EMC hosting UK launch event for Cloud storage services

Following the recent launch of our suite of cloud storage services, EMC have joined forces with us here at Redstor in hosting a series of UK launch events in London and Birmingham next month.

Many organisations, including FTSE 100 enterprises and household names are looking to the cloud as a way to alleviate costs and mitigate risks, whilst matching their IT requirements to their business requirements.

Is now the right time for you to look to the cloud? Are you considering building your own private storage cloud or having aspects of your data stored in a public storage cloud? Do you have serious questions about the choice of technology, the best route to implementation or whether your internal processes are ready?

If you answered yes to any of those questions and/or are keen to find out more about our cloud services then why not attend one of our FREE UK launch events? Simply click here to register and you could also win an Apple iPad!

Online Backup by Redstor overview - YouTube video

The video below gives an overview of some of the functionality of our cloud based, Online Backup service. Areas covered include how to perform the initial setup of the backup client, an overview of the storage platform and how the client connects to the storage platform. Also featured is the backup process, data restoration and the difference between server backups and Desktop/Laptop backups.

Online Backup by Redstor has been delivered to a variety of industries since 2005 by our community of channel partners. During this time, we have amassed in excess of 1PB of data under protection across our resilient Data Centres and through our 85 Education service providers, we have an addressable 14,000 schools in the UK backing up to our Data Centres each night.

If you'd like to find out more about Redstor's cloud services including Online Backup then please call our Reading office on +44 118 951 5200.

Redstor announces partnership with Nasuni

Redstor have announced our partnership with Nasuni, creator of the storage industry's leading cloud storage gateway. We developed our partnership with Nasuni through our EMC Atmos relationship and have been working with Nasuni since the final quarter of 2010.

Redstor are now able to offer our expanding customer base the Cloud NAS by Redstor service which utilises the Nasuni filer solution. This creates a secure, high performance NAS server with a connection to the Redstor Cloud Storage Platform. The Nasuni Filer simplifies access, storage and protection whilst eliminating any incremental expense and management issues inherent in hardware expansion.

Cloud NAS can be used as primary storage instead of, or in combination with traditional file servers as it provisions storage capacity automatically and delivers local-like performance. Features include synchronous snapshots, deduplication and encryption plus key management for security. Currently the Nasuni Filer manages tens of millions of files securely.

Cloud NAS by Redstor is one of three new online storage services powered by EMC Atmos. Redstor will utilise Atmos in our Cloud Storage Platform, hosted in geographically diverse data centres to provide secure cloud storage services to help customers of all sizes develop an overall cloud storage strategy.

Commenting on the partnership, Andres Rodriguez, CEO at Nasuni, said: "We are always looking to partner with leading cloud providers and are excited to be advancing our UK efforts with an established provider focused on delivering the best solution available to customers. We spent the last year building a loyal customer base and are now enabling partners to leverage our solution to provide customers the functionality of a traditional NAS while benefiting from the scalable, redundant and on demand features of the cloud. We are looking forward to working with Redstor and are pleased to be partnering with such a customer-centric organisation."

Tony Ruane, Business Development Director at Redstor, said "The Nasuni partnership has been developed as a result of the demand we have seen from our customers over the last five years for cloud offerings that move data to lower-cost storage locations. Nasuni allows us to deliver unlimited file storage via the cloud and complete protection from a single virtual file server, effectively opening the floodgates to our storage and driving increased recurring income to our partners. We are very pleased to be working with such an expert in the file storage sector."

For more information on Cloud NAS by Redstor, please call our Reading office on +44 118 951 5200.

Universities to share cloud services

According to an article on information-age.com, The Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) has allocated £12.5million to a new cloud computing shared services initiative for universities in order to ensure they're saving money and resources.

This move could see Universities using Online Backup by Redstor, Cloud Storage and CentraStage to reduce costs but retain enterprise class IT services in line with their business requirements.

City University of London's CIO, Andrew Abboud, said "We all have Data Centre requirements, so we've agreed to sit down to understand what those needs are and see if we can work together, whether it is to build our own facility or use our procurement power to get a cheaper price from someone else's facility".

E-Safety powered by Securus on Safer Internet Day

Today is Safer Internet Day, where several organisations come together to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones amongst children and young people across the world.

The current schooling generation are growing up with mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads at their fingertips as normal and are becoming more and more tuned in with technology. This in itself has hardened children's attitudes and behaviour, as seen in the reports in today's news that 20% of 11-15 year olds have received a sexually explicit text or e-mail in the past year.

One way in which schools can meet their Ofsted requirement for safeguarding and ensure their students are safe whilst online is using E-Safety by Redstor. This solution is powered by Securus and sits silently in the background and monitors everything that occurs on a student's PC without raising immediate alarm and disrupting the lesson if inappropriate content is detected. E-safety by Redstor addresses the pertinent challenge of protecting school children as young as 5 from inappropriate behaviour, content and cyberbullying whilst using ICT and the internet as part of their normal classroom education.

If you'd like to hear more about Securus powered E-Safety by Redstor, then please call our Reading office on +44118 951 5200.

Redstor wins cloud services for business award

As part of EMC's record breaking launch of their unified storage suite of products, today they hosted a Partner launch event. This was attended by a number of Redstor employees and alongside the launch of unified storage, there were also further details released about EMC Atmos. EMC Atmos is the new cloud software behind Redstor's new cloud storage services - Redstor Cloud Silo, Redstor Cloud NAS and Redstor Cloud Drive.

Redstor's cloud storage services enable organisations to scale up or down their storage requirements in line with their business requirements as well as mitigate risks and gain greater financial control with predictable costs.

EMC have recognised the hard work and development Redstor have put in on this journey to the cloud thus far, which has resulted in Redstor winning "EMC's cloud innovation partner of the year" award.

Tony Ruane, Redstor's Business Development Director said, "We're really pleased that our efforts have been recognised and foresee 2011 to be a year of significant growth around our cloud services."

Let this be the first of many recognitions we receive for blazing a trail in the cloud industry!

Curious as to our success in the cloud? Call our Reading office on +44 118 951 5200