Over the past few months the AhSay Offsite Backup and Replication service has surpassed our stability expectations and we are considering offering it as a managed service through our partners. Currently, AhSay is the solution we use in-house on all our servers for georedundant backups and we also offer it at cost to our partner base (at cost = your technical support comes directly from AhSay). We have met many of you that would like an additional tier, one at which we take care of all the backups and the logistics.

Here is what we are currently considering:

• Agents customized, branded and installed on the clients server(s)
• Advanced configuration support for multiple backup sets against the same username/password set
• Failed backup management (find out why backup failed, trigger a manual backup, fix the problem if possible)
• Monthly, quarterly or annual offsite data hardcopy
• Quota management and upgrades

From our support tracking on offsite backup, and your feedback, we have concluded that these are the biggest pain points you are currently experiencing and we would like to help. The data hardcopy involves shipping a hard drive with all the offsite data at a set interval, for example, we could ship a 250GB USB drive every quarter at a cost of $300 and let the client keep it in their safety deposit box. In terms of quota management, we can tell when the data is growing very closely to the quota limit and will ask for upgrade (or automatic upgrade permission, within reason) so that backup jobs do not fail. Finally, log troubleshooting and backup job adjustment – when it fails find out why it happened and fix it.

We are not ready to announce the pricing yet but this will not be at-cost product, it would be a full service product.

It is important to note that we still do not expect to offer this service as a retail product to be purchased off our web site, it is still going to be a partner-sold service. The reasoning behind this is that as good as we are at running the infrastructure we do not have the bandwidth to discuss the clients disaster recovery needs and requirements, their business continuity schedule or the amount of data that should be held offsite.

The partner response to our new data protection service has been simply incredible. As a result the amount of bandwidth and storage we are in process of allocating to it is equally enterprising.

We are expanding SAN and network allocation to our public AhSay servers. As a result you will likely experience some performance issues until the new storage systems are in place and the additional bandwidth is brought online. This will not affect your daily backup processes dramatically as the AhSay agent is set to automatically retry/resume as availability changes.

We expect the work on our storage networks to be complete by early Friday AM, EST; 9/26/2007. We’re sorry about any inconvenience this may cause you.