By Ahmad Permessur

Can you tell us more about yourself and your position at Righteous Software?

Sure my name is Mario Rodriguez and I currently wear the hat of Director of Sales & Client Services for R1Soft. As many of you know in this industry we position ourselves wherever we are needed which ultimately is in the best interest of our clients and peers. I have currently been in the Hosting industry over 8 years, previously serving clients over at EV1Servers.

So what is this new backup server about?

CDP Server, initially when we released our products we called it backups however as time progressed and our client base grew they made it clear to us that what we are providing was a true near-Continuous Data protection solution with a highly user-friendly web interface that makes protecting your data a no-brainer.

How does it differ from conventional backup software?

R1Soft Continuous Data Protection Server Software is a near continuous data protection solution capable of providing hundreds of recovery points per day scheduled as little as 5 or 10 minutes apart.

What type of web hosting plans are you targeting with your product? Will it work for shared hosting?

All of them, this solution can work for the guy that has one server all the way up to a data center deployment of 1000’s of servers.

Can web hosting companies resell your software?

Our software was completely designed with resellers in mind, they can definitely turn this into a value-add or an additional revenue stream to their clients all through the easy-to-use web interface. They can also setup their “resellers” to be able to offer their clients the ability to have access to their own files that they may have accidentally deleted.

How about the server’s performance during seeding of the disk’s image? Do you get any noticeable slow down during a backup or recovery process?

Great question, with conventional software the biggest problem for any host is the resource utilization involved while a backup is being performed that is why traditionally you will see weekly or even nightly backups. With R1Soft CDP technology there is virtually _NO LOAD_ on your production/shared/dedicated server which makes it possible to perform data protection as often as every 5 mins. even on heavily loaded servers. CDP Server protects disk volume data using replication and synchronization over the network storing point-in-time snap shots in disk-based storage.

From what I read on your site, you use disk image technologies. However, can the customer still browse and restore a particular file or folder from one of the past incremental backups?

Absolutely, our solutions make it possible for the customer or even the customer’s / customer to be able to restore particular files from any of the many recovery points allowed to be maintained on the R1Soft CDP Server.

How about security and integrity policy – how much can your users trust your software?

CDP Server supports strong encryption of disk data using RSA keys and the blowfish cipher. During a synchronization data is encrypted (and optionally compressed) on the agent and sent to the server over the network where it is stored in encrypted form. The data can only be decrypted using a RSA key protected with a passphrase. During a bare-metal restore disk sectors are decrypted on the fly at the agent.

CDP Server communicates over the network using the TCP based Block Transfer Protocol developed by Righteous Software. This protocol enables the efficient pipelining of disk sectors and blocks over the network. All blocks are verified on the sending and receiving end using MD5 check sums. The CDP Agent authenticates CDP Servers using RSA keys. All data is encrypted using RSA keys and blowfish cipher with 128-bit keys.

What network protocol does CDP Server use? Does it use TCP or UDP?

CDP Server uses TCP, for it’s reliability over various networks.

It looks like that your software can be integrated as add-ons to control panels and database. Do you plan to support more control panels and database technologies in the future?

Our product’s direction is completely driven by our clients and their needs, the control panels we currently support are what a good portion of the hosting market share currently run on their servers. We are by no means limited to possible future control panel integrations if we see a demand we will definitely meet the needs of our clients.

Did you consider offering your own backup servers co-located in some data centers?

R1Soft is definitely not going to compete with it’s clients, essentially we envision all data protected everywhere using our R1Soft CDP Solutions.

Are there some feature additions planned for this project?

We are always looking for ways to improve upon our products and offerings, take for example our recent add-on release CDP Server Service Provider API. A great add-on that will allow clients to completely provision offerings into their existing provisioning/billing platforms as needed.

What do you think about the current trends in data protection? Are there still a lot of companies vulnerable to data loss?

After exhibiting at a handful of tradeshows and speaking to clients up-close there is definitely a continued need for a problem that no one really wants to talk about. Until now CDP was not clearly an option for this industry or anyone running Linux we have made this possible by providing the technology solutions to a dynamically apt market, R1Soft CDP is now the buzzword….

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