e-fort Effortless Data Protection is a complete data protection strategy for the Microsoft platform that is rich in functionality and low in risk, providing fast and granular protection. It employs the latest generation technology and is backed by industry leading vendors to provide the highest performance and reliability.

Rich Microsoft Compatibility

The e-fort data protection service is based on Microsoft’s System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM). DPM boasts unrivalled performance and compatibility with the Microsoft platform, including the ability to protect production Microsoft servers without impacting their performance or requiring the scheduling of lengthy legacy backup windows.

The service offers multiple options to quickly recover data; not just from the most recent snapshot, but from multiple points in history, with total flexibility in how and where the recovery is performed depending on your circumstances.

Fully-Supported Applications and Servers:

• Microsoft Windows File servers (2003 SP1, 2003R2, 2008, 2008 R2)
• Terminal Services, Active Directory, IIS
• Microsoft Exchange Server System (2003 SP2, 2007, 2010)
• Microsoft Communications Server (OCS 2007, OCS 2007 R2)
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (WSS 3.0, MOSS 2007, MOSS 2010)
• Microsoft SQL Server (2000 SP4, 2005, 2008)
• MS Virtualised Environments (Virtual Server 2005 R2, Hyper-V)

Microsoft Exchange Server and the e-fort Service

In addition to full block-based protection performed by the e-fort service, the Exchange Server transaction logs are replicated to offer an even more up-to-date degree of protection. In the event a full recovery is required, the most recent snapshot can be augmented by log information to achieve an efficient, accurate and recent recovery of Exchange data.

Microsoft SQL Server and the e-fort Service

As e-fort is based upon Microsoft DPM, it takes full advantage of the additional functionality DPM provides above and beyond simply talking to SQL’s API, and so provides complete data protection including the ability to recover data at the database level. While of course e-Fort can provide data recovery for file system data on standard file servers, the various data structures within an SQL database are more interdependent than flat files.

The DPM protection agent used on Microsoft SQL Servers uses the VSS (Volume Snapshot Service) capabilities of Windows Server to take a snapshot of the entire database once, ensuring a consistent view of the data. The possibility of data corruption caused by recovering tables or rows within a table independently of related data needed to properly reconstruct the database is therefore avoided.

SharePoint Server and the e-fort Service

One of the highlights of the e-fort data protection service is that it fully supports the real-time protection of data residing in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 data, so that access by your staff is maintained at all hours.

Because SharePoint stores data in a mixture of flat files and structured database (SQL), it can be extremely difficult to protect seamlessly using legacy methods, and even more complex when accurate recovery is required. The e-fort service takes advantage of Microsoft DPM’s SharePoint and SQL agent technologies, and so offers complete and consistent protection with no interruption. More importantly, granular (site-level) recovery of your SharePoint data is available whenever it is required, with the minimum of SharePoint service interruption.

Virtualized Servers and the e-Fort Service

As a latest generation data protection service, e-fort fully supports Microsoft virtual server environments running under either MS Virtual Server 2005 R2, or Hyper-V.

If the Virtual Machine (VM) is running Windows Server 2003 or later, the e-fort service protects the entire virtual server without downtime and at the highest level of data integrity available through any means today.

If the VM is running an unsupported operating system, e-fort briefly hibernates the VM then identifies and replicates only the blocks that have changed since the previous operation, before it restores the VM to operation. This process is very quick with very minimal interruption to operation.

Scalable

The e-fort service will not only cater for your current data protection requirements, but will accommodate likely growth. e-fort has been designed to provide capacity on demand negating the need for our clients to expend capital on increasing the capacity of legacy backup facilities.

Visible

e-fort automatically provides daily email reports to a nominated address, to confirm the status of all data protection activities.

Independently Audited

The e-fort Effortless Data Protection managed service puts the security of your data at the top of our priority list. To ensure this level of security, e-fort has engaged BDO Kendalls to provide audit and risk assessments of the system design and services provided by e-fort.

Segregation and Security

Great pains have been taken in e-fort’s infrastructure design to ensure both logical and physical segregation of all customers.

• The e-fort Primary Node does not require administrator-level access to your local servers once the system has been deployed nor does it reside inside your Active Directory domain,
• Each client is provisioned their own virtual Secondary Node within the e-fort Secondary Storage Facility, including their own logical disk array,
• All customers are connected via a dedicated point-to-point communications link (not an Internet connection) which is further regulated by a Cisco firewall at each end of the service,
• The e-fort Secondary Storage facility is not connected directly to the Internet.

Redundant

The entire e-fort platform has been constructed with high availability in mind. This design goal extends to hardware, software and all key systems ensuring that if, for whatever reason part of the system becomes unavailable or inaccessible, there are redundant systems in place to ensure business interruption is minimised and that service continuity is maintained.

Recovery data is available both locally (preferred) and across the wire from e-fort, guaranteeing both high performance and fault tolerance.