February 26, 2009
Druvaa announced the general availability of long awaited inSync enterprise laptop backup v3 beta on Windows platform. The beta release adds features like search, bare-metal restore and performance improvements.
Druvaa is one of the fastest growing startup in enterprise storage and backup domain. The flagship product Druvaa inSync is fully automated laptop backup software which protects corporate data for office and remote users. It features simple backup, point-in-time restores, and patent-pending deduplication technology to make backups much faster.
The new beta includes the following features -
Find our more about beta and download a free copy from – http://www.druvaa.com/insync/beta
Over 80% of corporate data is duplicated across users. Druvaa inSync uses data deduplication to save “only a single copy” of content (emails/docs) duplicated across users. This delivers 10X faster backup with 90% reduction in bandwidth and storage.
The product uses Continuous Data Protection to create near-infinite restore points. On restore the user sees a timeline view of data and can restore from any point in the past.
Key Product highlights includes -
Product Page – http://www.druvaa.com/insync/laptop-backup
About Druvaa
Founded in 2007, Druvaa Software is a leading provider of Continuous Data Protection and Disaster Recovery solutions. Since inception Druvaa has released two award wining products products – Druvaa inSync and Druvaa Phoenix. Druvaa is privately held and backed by Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Accord International (HK).
Corporate Website – http://www.druvaa.com/
By now, all good designers and developers realize the importance of usability for their work. Usable products offer great user experiences, and great user experiences lead to happy customers.
Six common mistakes and recommendations for product design and usability -
1. Usability Vs Utility
Utility refers to the ability of the product to perform tasks. The more tasks the product is designed to perform, the more utility it has. Usability refers to the ease of learning and performing these tasks.
Most software give higher priority to features than usability. As a result it becomes more and more confusing for the end user to get work done.
2. Liking it Vs Using It
Likeability is always a desirable trait in a product. If people like the product, they are more likely to use it and to recommend it to others. But as with utility, likeability is often confused with usability.
People often like a product for reasons unrelated to utility and usability. They may be attracted to its styling and flash, or to the status they believe the product confers upon them. People tend to like highly usable products, but you should not assume that means a well-liked product is usable.
3. Discovery Vs Flow
Some of the most widely used products do not have an instructions manual e.g. toothbrush or Skype.
Products with “Installation Manuals” turn me off. IMO, there is place on earth for installation manuals. And admin guides should be only when you want to learn a little extra or troubleshoot. Instead the product should try and use inline or in-GUI help as much as possible.
Discovery involves looking for, and finding, a product’s feature in response to a particular need. And it gets worse when a complex feature needs multiple inputs or choices to be made.
I am a big fan of wizards. I think the task becomes much simpler when broken down into series of actions.
4. Tiny Meaningless buttons
The buttons should signify action. The most common mistake with buttons is when they are labeled “OK” which in my opinion makes very little sense.
Buttons should have lables which signify clear actions like – “Modify Report Schedule”
5. Duplicate Actions
Quite often, products have more than one ways of performing the same task. This is confusing and often irritating. There should always be one clear way of performing an action.
6. Don’t Give Too Many Choices
Never confuse flexibility with giving too many choice. You would never buy car from a salesman who gives you 8-10 names for “the cars that might suit you”. Instead you are more likely to buy, when the salesman gives you 1 (or max 2) options and convinces you.
If you are sure that more than 80% of your audience is likely to vote “yes” for the option, please make it a default. Or if you really want it, add it to “advanced”.
Disclosure
If you think inSync is a very user friendly product, you would be pleasently surprised with the upcoming upgrade. Usability has been one of our core focus areas in inSync v3 release.
We all pay our monthly electricity bills. I am sure no one wants to own a power plant 
But, on the contrary most of us own cars and very few rent it for daily use.
The two most important factors which decide how we want to use these two services are -
Cloud computing today promises benefits (which are similar to using electricity) for computing, hosted application and storage. Although the offer is very lucrative, but their is a dark side to this as well.
The post just tries to some aspects which you must keep in mind before making the plunge.
The Dark Side of the Cloud
Most of the services like SimpleDB, EBS, SQS still needs a lot of application integration and porting. And that’s something enterprises hate. It’s one of the primary reasons the X86 architecture and IPV4 are so widely used. Even if someone ports the application to these services, he is guaranteed to be locked with it for the rest of his life
Services like salesforce.com don’t need any porting, but there have been cases of access to data being refused customers who wish to change the vendor.
Most of these services including Amazon and Salesforce do not give uptime and QoS guarantees. The billing and EULA are free from any such clauses.
And when there is a downtime, you can’t do much than start calling the support center to play the blame-game. And its funny when see the the cloud provider talking the same language to its service provider
Take a recent unfortunate situation for Ylastic, a company that provides a single front-end to manage Amazon Web Services, who was recently an unwillingly participant in one of these cloud bursts. Ylastic noticed something strange occurring with one of the Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) Elastic Block Stores (EBS).
But something wasn’t quite right. And over the course of a few hours the story played out via Twitter as Ylastic noticed issues with its EBS instances. When the problem was finally identified, Ylastic discovered that the data could not be recovered. They were forced to recover from an earlier snapshot, that contained only a subset of the data.
Finally, after recovering what data they could, Ylastic had to go to its customers with the unfortunate message:
“AWS has finally terminated the frozen instances. But the EBS volume is still detaching and has been for hours. It doesn’t seem like we will be able to get into it at this point. Some time in the last month or so, our EBS snapshotting of this stuck volume seems to have stopped working correctly…. We have gone back and run through all the snapshots, and the last good snapshot that we have is from October 1.”
Who was at fault? Amazon? Ylastic? Truly, no one. It was simply a combination of issues. A perfect storm in the cloud, as it were. And that perfect storm resulted in data loss for Ylastic and its customer base.
Take for example the case when you take up a cheap hosted website plan on a shared server. You can still negotiate uptime and QoS guarantees. But, what you just can’t control is a SPAM King sharing the same server and IP address with you
Most likely you will face two problems -
Plus, there been many stories around salesforce (read this and this) and twitter getting hacked.
Cost of ownership for a power plant is so damn high, that you just can’t afford one even if you are not happy with your power company. That exactly has to be the case for the cloud. No one would think of hosting his own solution when the cloud offers the same peanuts.