Frequently Asked Questions

Upgrades are included in the cost of the service and are released as they become available. Upgrades are automatically applied and do not require any action on your part.

Yes

Your server is hosted on our VMware vSphere infrastructure. Our hosts are HP BL series units and we run our blades in an N+1 capacity where N is the amount of blades required to run all VMware images and +1 is sufficient spare capacity to cope with the failure of 1 blade server. Each blade server chassis has multiple redundant power supplies and fans.

In the event of a failure of any physical blade, the VMware HA function will automatically boot your VMware server onto another available blade.  In the event of a failure of a blade server chassis, your server will be rebooted onto a spare blade in another Cloud Data location.  In the event of a power failure at the datacentre, your server will be rebooted onto a spare blade in another Cloud Data location.

Cloud Data manage a BGP network between our Datacentre locations - this means we can route IP addresses to any of our site.  We use FalconStor NSS to take snapshots at 15 minute intervals and these are replicated to a secondary datacentre location.  In the event of a datacentre failure, virtual machine images are booted up at the secondary datacentre and the most recent snapshot is mounted to the failover virtual machines.  The server will have appeared to have rebooted, as if the power were interrupted momentarily.

Yes – we take regular snapshots of all virtual machine images which are stored for 30 days according to the following schedule - 15 minute snapshots retained for 24 hours, 24 hour snapshots retained for 7 days, weekly snapshots retained for 30 days.  Should you need to roll back to a snapshot you will need to log a support request. No scheduled file backup is included with the standard product offering however you can add Cloud Data Backup as an additional service should a scheduled backup be required.

If you have VMware VMDK files these can be either FTP’d to us or shipped to us on removable storage media (optical or USB). There is a charge for us to load your images onto our hosting platform of £99 per virtual machine image.

Files can be restored by accessing the interface on the CDP appliance. Select the file or files you wish to restore and they will be automatically downloaded over your Internet connection.

The FalconStor CDP appliance uses sophisticated compression and encryption techniques to keep bandwidth requirements to a minimum. You will need a permanent leased line internet connection preferably at Ethernet speed. Ability to restore large files will be dependent on the download speed of your connection – the faster the better.

Program files account for many of the files on your computer. In the event of a computer failure, it is usually best to re-install your software from its original source (CDs, etc). And, it will keep your bill lower, if you use Cloud Data’s Online backup software only to backup your data files--not program files.
If you want to provide protection for installed programs, you may want to consider our Failover solution. Click here for more in formation.

You may backup any time you want to by clicking the "Backup Now" button. You may also set a schedule to backup your data as frequently as every 4 hours.

1. Open Cloud Data Backup and open your Backup-Set Settings.
2. Click on “Backup Schedule” and click on the “Add” button. Here you can rename the backup set, change the frequency and select the time you want your backups to start.
3. Once your selections are complete press “OK”.
4. In order for your settings to become final, click on the “Save Setting” button.

Yes. Cloud Data not only protects the current version of your data, it also protects older versions of every file. When installed, our Online backup software is configured to keep all changes made in the previous 7 days for every file. So, if you have a file that you change every day, you can restore any of the previous 7 versions of that file. If you want more versions than 7 days we can increase that up to 1 year.

In the Restore window, select the file(s) you want to restore and click Restore Files.

Viruses cannot function after encryption. When an infected file is backed up to the Cloud Data server, the virus remains dormant because the virus-infected file has been compressed and encrypted. You are further protected because there is no program which will invoke the virus in the backup environment. When and infected file is restored, however, the virus become active again. It is essential to run updated anti-virus software on all systems.

Yes, antivirus is included in the fee and installed by default.

You may pay Direct Debit or credit card.

Some users request that we periodically copy their data set to removable media. We charge £50 per CD or DVD data set.

You will only incur additional charges by upgrading the specification of your server or the size of your storage partition. We include 2Mbps average bandwidth utilisation per server. In the event that your 95th percentile bandwidth utilisation regularly exceeds 2Mbps we reserve the right to charge for additional bandwidth at the rate of £20 per Mbps per month.

No.

No.

Cloud Data charge for the Server Failover service in 3 ways:

1. Initial Setup which includes CDP appliance cost (or this can be amortised over the contract term)
2. Amount of Data stored on our SAN (price per GB per month) based on maximum storage used in the previous month
3. Hosting of failover servers beyond the inclusive failover events

You may pay monthly in advance Direct Debit or credit card, or quarterly in advance by cheque

No, the data is only accessible by the server (virtual machine) configured to access the virtual disk over iSCSI.

Each server has 1 public IP address more are available on request on completion of a RIPE allocation form – we charge an administration fee of £25 per allocation request (not per IP address). We do not charge a rental for IP addresses.

We include 1 failover event of up to 5 days duration with the service. Additional days or events are chargeable at our standard hosting rates for an equivalent virtual machine running on our VMware ESX platform.

Failover is a manual process which must be initiated by you by raising a support ticket via our support portal. We can monitor your servers and contact you proactively in the event of an outage however we will not initiate a failover event without a specific instruction from you. On receipt of the instruction we run VMware vConverter on the images of the servers you wish to failover (which are stored on our SAN) and we then boot the newly created virtual machines onto VMware ESX platform.

Yes. We insist on a failover test twice a year to prove to you and us that the service is working as expected. The cost of failing over is included in the service fee.

The FalconStor CDP software uses sophisticated compression and encryption techniques to keep bandwidth requirements to a minimum. You will need a permanent internet connection at broadband speeds or higher. Ability to restore large files will be dependent on the download speed of your connection – the faster the better.