This week sees the world’s largest event for educational technology roll into London as BETT takes over Olympia, bringing in 30,000 visitors to view the latest ICT solutions such as Online Backup for Schools and E-Safety.

Redstor have exhibited at BETT for many years now and have traditionally seen the majority of our appointments take place with ICT Schools’ Support Teams from Local Authorities. With the budget cuts biting and schools being given more autonomy, we have seen a swing towards private sector companies providing ICT services for schools. This resulted in 45% of our appointments in 2011 being with private sector ICT service providers. It remains to be seen whether or not 2012 will be the year in which the number of private sector providers meeting with us exceeds the number of Local Authority support teams – we will update you next week post-BETT.

Our stand at BETT is U23, feel free to pop by and discover more about our educational ICT services, including RBUSS+, our Online Backup for Secondary Schools service.

Cloud Backup and Storage provider Redstor, will be exhibiting at the Cloud Expo Europe Show at London’s Olympia between the 25^th and 26^th of January.

Redstor will be focusing on it’s Cloud Tiering Appliance which enables data to be moved from high-cost primary Network Attached Storage (NAS) environments to the Redstor Cloud.

The Cloud Tiering Service provides fully automated, policy-based file movement, enabling organisations to meet data growth challenges by improving capacity utilisation of high-cost primary storage, reducing the volume of data to be backed up and protected.

This service is based on and powered by EMC’s Atmos Storage Platform.

Redstor will be exhibiting with their data centre infrastructure partner, Equinix, on stand 331.

We look forward to meeting with you there.

In a recent news article, a Welsh Local Authority have received an ICO fine for £130,000 after breaching ICO legislation around data protection. This fine is the largest placed on a single organisation since those powers came into effect and is the latest incident in the area of council data loss.

Since April 2010, Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) have had the power to levy fines up to £500,000 on organisations who are found misplacing data or handling unsecure personal data. Redstor’s cloud data protection services offer organisations the chance to encrypt data and securely store data in the cloud. Since 2005, Redstor have been working with local government organisations to backup school data to our UK backup grid.

Redstor has been exhibiting at the recent EMC Rapid Fire Conferences in Edinburgh, Manchester and Twickenham.

The conference covered off several main themes: Information Intelligence – taking action on big data, Information mobility and accessibility – next generation data protection and recovery, cloud ready data centres and how to build trust in the Cloud space.

What was clear was that IT was all about services and outcomes and not about the technology. The Cloud is changing how IT is built, run and consumed and it is becoming all SLA governed.

At the event, Redstor has been featuring it’s popular Cloud Backup Service which is re-sold through over 130 partners. Redstor was also unveiling the EMC Cloud Tiering Service as a way to offload cold data to the Redstor Storage Cloud. Based around the EMC Cloud Tiering Appliance, the service is a policy based file tiering, archiving and migration service and all data is replicated between Redstor’s 2 UK data centres and is underpinned by the EMC Atmos platform. Archiving data off to the cloud is especially relevant given the projections of file based and block based data growth forecast at 80% and 31% compound respectively.

For further information on archiving data to the cloud or looking at online backup, you can call Redstor on +44 118 951 5200.

Come and join us at the BETT show in Olympia between 11th and 14th January at stand U23.

Redstor have been exhibiting for many years at the show since 2006 and have witnessed the transformations being made in the provision of ICT support services to schools.

Over the years, Redstor has been providing online backup services (now called cloud backup services) to primary schools through its partner base which has been predominantly ICT Schools’ Support team within Local Authorities. As the schools have developed more autonomy, and with the spending cuts in Local Authorities biting, we have seen a shift in the provision of services and last year 45% of our appointments were with private sector companies looking to or already providing support services to schools.  Will 2012 represent the first year when private sector Redstor appointments exceeds public sector?

More on BETT to follow on our blog and Redstor Twitter

CentraStage technology delivers simple, easy to use IT management at a very sensible price, combining a range of functionality in one platform. It allows IT support teams to manage and monitor PCs, laptops and servers, regardless of where devices are located and where the IT support team are based. It is perfect for businesses with a distributed IT environment and mobile workers. More importantly in the current climate we find that people are moving to CentraStage to improve their efficiency and reduce their costs.

So what does it do? Once the CentraStage agent is deployed to PCs, laptops, servers, it delivers through a single platform:

1)      Audit and asset management – know what hardware and software is out there.

2)      Monitoring – know the state of the environment, and what is about to fall over (or has done so). Monitor performance, security, backups etc.

3)      Software deployment and device configuration – target devices for one-off or scheduled recurring software deployments and config, reducing repetitive manual tasks.

4)      Remote support – instant diagnostics of devices via full remote task manager, and remote support options should you need access to individual devices.

5)      Reporting – audit/asset reports, health reports, activity reports.

6)      Power Management – reducing your carbon footprint

On the 18^th October, Redstor hosted its partner update day at the Oxford Gun Club.

Paul Evans, Managing Director of Redstor, spoke about how the IT industry was experiencing unprecedented change driven by the consumeristaionn of IT, the move to the Cloud and that staying still was not an option for IT Service Providers.  He continued that Redstor had been and was continuing to go through a massive transition to transform its business into a provider of cloud  services, in particular Cloud backup and storage.

Tony Ruane, Business Development Director, then spoke about the changes to the RBUSS (Redstor Backup Service for Schools) pricing and how the service continues to be adopted and the growing acceptance of online backup for secondary schools.

Brian Evans then spoke about E-Safety in Schools and the duty schools have to safeguard and promote the welfare of their children and provide a safe ICT learning environment. This was becoming increasingly important with the widespread  use of computers in schools and the growth of the internet. Adopting a managed approach to e-safety as championed by Redstor’s partner Securus was deemed preferable to a locked down approach.

The final topic covered was how to deliver Schools’ IT services in an efficient manner by using CentraStage. In particular how to move the Schools ICT support model from a reactive to a proactive and predictive one. Somerset County Council had saved over 1,000 work days by automating mundane and repetitive tasks with CentraStage, Bristol City Council were able to reduce the amount of time spent on site by 40% freeing up technician’s time and East Sussex County Council were able to automate 60% of their tasks using the powerful tool.

Oh and by the way, the winner of the clay shooting day was Luke Wilbraham from Turn IT On. Congratulations Luke!

Yesterday saw Redstor exhibit at the most recent EMC Rapid Fire Conference, hosted at Old Trafford in Manchester. This conference is one in a series of 4 and was well attended by SME and Enterprise organisations looking to discuss big data, managing data growth, cloud storage , next generation data management and cloud archiving.

At the conference, Redstor spoke with many organisations with regards to our new Cloud tiering service, which moves information from primary storage (EMC VNX, EMC Celerra and NetApp) to Redstor’s EMC Atmos-based cloud infrastructure. Managed by policy, “cold data” is sent to Redstor using a cloud tiering appliance before being replicated between two geographically dispersed UK secure data centres.

Redstor recently attended the inaugural  meeting of the UK Cloud Alliance, formed of 17 organisations screened and collected by Star to work together and provide cloud services to SME’s in the UK.

The meeting was very successful, with a lot of knowledge share amongst like minded people committed to working together and serve the UK market.

Redstor provide the Online Backup element of UK Cloud Alliance, allowing organisations to protect their data securely in a way which reduces costs, reduces risks and reduces management time.

Online Backup is an automated, encrypted service which Redstor have been providing to organisations since 2004. During this time, we have created one of the UK’s biggest backup only platforms which today protects 1PB of data.

Redstor are pleased to announce that they we are exhibiting today at the SCHOOLS NorthEast Summit at St James Park, Newcastle.

The SCHOOLS NorthEast Summit is the annual event bringing together the North East’s School Leaders and leading educationalists and decision makers to discuss the issues, practice, challenges and opportunities that will shape education now and in the coming years. Organised around the four themes of Empower, Provoke, Inspire and Connect, the Summit encourages innovative approaches, creative solutions and new relationships.

We’ll be talking about our key services into education including RBUSS, RBUSS Mobile and Redstor E-Safety as well as building relationships with some of the key people at schools and Local Authorities.