In June last year we bought shiny new laptops for the office.  They were lovely, lightweight, fast and we all worked happily together.  Then on Monday morning, Chris switched on his laptop, ready for the week ahead.  Or tried to switch on.  But for some reason it had completely given up the ghost and died.  Fortunately for us, the laptop was still under its 12 month warranty so we asked the manufacturer to send a new hard drive.  This arrived on Tuesday so we fixed the laptop.

Even more fortunately for us, we have all our own business data backed up automatically with Replicate Data so it’s safely stored off site.  We started the data restore on Tuesday afternoon, left the laptop switched on overnight and by Wednesday morning all Chris’s data (30Gb worth) was back.  Everything.  Documents, emails, contact lists, photographs.  Email rules and contact groups saved.  Everything in the same place  and format it was in before.   So it’s been easy for him to carry on working with minimum interruption.

Do you know what would happen to your business in a similar situation?  So many people say to us “the computer is new so it’s OK”.  We knew before it wasn’t.  But now we know from our own experience as well.

Contact us for a no obligation quote and to find out how we can protect your business data.

The survey undertaken jointly by the British Insurance Brokers’ Association and the Cabinet Office found 83% of insurers questioned agreed with the above.  The aim of the survey was to develop a clearer picture of the benefits of having resilience measure in place.  These were identified as improved competitiveness, continuity of service during common disruptions and more serious emergencies, as well as reduced premiums and excesses.

The event, co-organised by 24/7 Uptime and Andy O’Sullivan of Andems Runners, had 44 runners tackling the route around Hollingworth Lake and Littleborough.  Running uphill for the first 2 miles and then on moorland, track and road in very icy and exposed conditions made fast finishing times difficult.  Winner Simon Bruton from Salford Harriers finished in 29 minutes 24 seconds, with 24/7 Uptime’s Chris Robinson finishing in 13th place in 39 minutes 56 seconds.

Congratulations to everyone who took part in the race and those who kindly sponsored the runners.  Now let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope we see Andrew Steele come tops in the 2012 Olympics!

The Wired City events are business collaboration/networking events specifically aimed at digital, creative and ICT companies.  They’ve produced some good business and collaborations.

The Stockport Wired City Reconnected Event runs from 5.30pm until 8.30pm at the Houldsworth Suite, Houldsworth Mill, Stockport, SK5 6DA.

Interested in attending?  Contact les.selby@albaassoc.com for more information or to register.

“Sainsbury’s is implementing a new virtualised environment in each of its 600 major stores. Fraser is planning to install two servers at the back of each store that will be fully virtualised, allowing new systems and applications to be distributed centrally from Sainsbury’s datacentres, negating the need for engineers to visit stores. All the old systems will also be ripped out and stored virtually on the new servers, reducing the amount of hardware in each store.

“This is one of the main reasons we are putting in a virtualised environment, which will be completed over the next year, so we don’t have to keep visiting a store to do a rollout,” says Fraser.

“Historically what we would do is every time we thought of a new system we would put a new server in the back of the shop. Before long you have got an awful lot of servers. What we have now realised is that we will always be putting new systems in shops, so we needed to think about the back of shops as virtualised datacentres,” he adds.

“What we are doing is putting in a pair of much bigger physical servers into each shop, the first of which has been rolled out as part of Brand Match, and then over time we will take the smaller ones out, but virtualise what they do onto the new pair.”

Read the full Computing.co.uk article here.

Contact the 24/7 Uptime team to discuss your server virtualisation requirements and learn how we can help you.

Visa Europe said Monday was its busiest ever online shopping day, with £303M set to be spent online on Visa cards in the UK; a 12% increase on 2010.

This record online spend, which amounts to £210,000 per minute, or £3,500 per second, includes more than 4.8 million transactions.

Read the full article in the Manchester Evening News here.

See how Marathon everRun and 247host high availability hosting keep retail environments up and running 24/7.

The report said 74% of the companies surveyed were not confident they could fully restore their networks and 54% admitted they had lost data or suffered systems downtime in the past 12 months.

A total 1,750 IT bosses in countries including the UK were questioned.  The most common cause of data loss and downtime was hardware failure followed by power outage.

To read the full BBC survey click here.

Since then we’ve reported back our carbon footprint figures so the Mayday Network team can measure how all the members are reducing their impact on the environment.  There are currently 3,500 companies across the UK involved in this initiative – it would be good to see more.  If you would like more information or to get involved please click here.

We’re trying to help him to raise funds so my colleague, Chris, who is a keen runner himself, has been speaking to Andems Runners in Rochdale to organise a fund-raising race early next year.  This has now been set for Sunday 12 February and is a 5 mile course around Hollingworth Lake and Littleborough. All proceeds raised go towards Andrew’s training funds so please spread the word!

Download the entry form for the Andrew Steele Race 12 Feb 2012