Comet now provides an official exporter for Prometheus, a free, open source server health metrics, monitoring, and alerting application.
Our exporter allows you to run this as a sidecar container to pull metrics from Comet Server and export them in a Prometheus-compatible format. We have details available here our on Git to get started.
Now available for Comet partners is our rebrandable sales brochure:
This brochure and its assets are available in a handy downloadable zip in InDesign format ready to be customised for your business. You can download this from the "Marketing Resources" page of the "Resources" menu, after signing into your CometBackup.com dashboard account.
We love metrics. Recently we were profiled by Klipfolio who provide one of our most useful internal tools for viewing the live metrics of Comet. Find out more below:
The interview is available here
If you are thinking about now using Klipfolio yourself feel free to use our promo code :)
Recently Magnus Box founder Mike Slodowski was interviewed on the Computer Repair Podcast about his journey from being a break-fix shop to opening Magnus Box - a channel focused backup provider powered using Comet.
Curious about getting Comet Enterprise running in your Ubuntu/Debian environment?
Join us below for a walk through on how to get started.
Join Mason and Josh (Wednesday, February 26, 12pm PST) again as we dive into the first milestone release of 2019. In this we will be covering what's new inside before looking closer at the boosters that we offer with a focus on Application-Aware Writer and Program Output.
Click the image below to register
One of the earliest cloud storage companies we included support for was Backblaze B2 storage. Since then we've heard nothing but love from their users about what they do and with the most recent announcement of securing a $15m equipment lease line to help with expansion, we put a bunch of questions to Partner Program Manager James Fleishman. Enjoy!
Q1. For those people living under a rock, can you give us a quick intro to Backblaze B2?
Backblaze B2 is a cloud storage service for data storage. Files are available for uploading or downloading at any time, either through the Backblaze website, hundreds of third party integrations, including Comet Backup, or via the B2 API.
Q2. We’re seeing quite a bit of competition in the cloud storage space, how does B2 set itself apart?
Backblaze sets itself apart in three ways: Simplicity, Price and Sustainability.
Simplicity: everything about B2 is designed to be simple to use. Accessing your account via our website is easy. We don’t have complicated storage tiers that are hard to understand. You pay only for what you use - there are no minimum storage amounts, minimum storage days, retention periods or other fine print. And, getting started only takes a few minutes.
Pricing: is meant to be affordable: storage is $0.005 per GB/Month or roughly $5/TB/month. Uploads are completely free while downloads are only $0.01 per GB. Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is 1/4 the price of Amazon S3 for storage and 1/9th the price for downloads.
Sustainable: Backblaze has been in business for 12 years and manages 700 PB of data for over 500,000 customers. Backblaze has never raised significant investment capital, preferring to build a sustainable business using customer revenue and being very open about how the service is fairly priced. From building our own storage servers, to building our own storage software and detailing the costs of our business. Choosing a cloud storage provider is a bit like choosing an apartment to rent. Your landlord must be financially secure so your building isn’t foreclosed on and you don’t get locked out. Backblaze proves it is financially secure.
Q3. Can you tell us a bit about B2’s storage configuration and technology?
Backblaze stores all files uploaded using the Backblaze Vault architecture, which is described here.
This article describes how the data is distributed over 20 storage pods, how those storage pods are isolated from each other, how our implementation of the Reed-Solomon Erasure coding algorithm is used, how we handle “silent” data corruption, scaling, availability and finally durability.
The Backblaze Vault architecture is made up of storage pods that have been designed internally at Backblaze and deployed in our data center. Details of the latest storage pod, version 6.0 is here.
Finally, one other very popular thing we do is publish hard drive stats about the 83k+ drives we have spinning in our data center. You can learn more about that here.
Q4. Recently you announced ‘Compute Partnerships’ with Packet and ServerCentral for B2, what are the benefits of this partnership?
Our compute partnerships allow Backblaze customers to rent compute in the cloud, close enough to B2 Cloud Storage to get high performance, low latency access to the data. Customers no longer need to buy computers, networking, or bandwidth to get multi-Gbps performance for applications like disaster recovery or remote management.
Q5. For MSP’s and service providers what are the advantages of using B2 for their storage?
MSPs and service providers get all the advantages above: a simple, affordable and sustainable storage system that directly integrates with Comet Backup.
Q6. Very important final question – should pineapple be on pizza?
NO
Thanks James! If you are wanting to know more about B2 and their offering, jump over their website below!
Recently we announced compatibility with Cynny Space, an Italian cloud object storage company. We also posed some questions about Cynny Space's technology, pizza preferences and more to their founder/CEO.
Founder/CEO Andrea Marchi
Q1. Hi Andrea, can you give us an introduction about who and what Cynny Space is?
Cynny Space is an Italian based cloud Object Storage provider. We developed a fully integrated hardware and software solution to deliver durable data storage for businesses with sustainability in mind. Our solution brings a number of benefits including; greater agility, improved security, durability and energy efficiency - all of which help to alleviate costs and enhance user experience.
Q2. We’re seeing quite a bit of competition in the cloud storage space, how does Cynny Space set itself apart?
Our company objective is to provide the most efficient and eco-friendly storage platform – so that’s what sets us apart. We are also highly competitive price-wise thanks to our innovative technology. We develop all the technology internally, from hardware design to the unique self-healing swARM file-system. We are extremely eco-friendly. Our tiny, energy efficient ARM micro-servers are part of the vision we have for a greener planet. The energy they save is impressive - annually the equivalent of CO2 emissions absorbed by three adult trees.
Q3. Can you tell us about your technology stack and why you decided on it?
We designed the first ARM® server engineered for optimal data management. Measuring 8.3 x 3.4 cm, it is the smallest server fully equipped to store data. Thanks to the server's small size and a smart use of physical space, Cynny Space's is able to offer both high computing power and rack storage density without a single point of failure.
The large number of microservers are connected to the net without a layer in between. The filesystem (SwARM) is made up of nodes that work in concert within a distributed peer-to-peer architecture. This allows the nodes to deliver service continuity and cope with hardware failure. All nodes are equal, and none is fundamental for the system to operate. The workload is spread across many points, making the File System reliable and fast. The system self-organizes, self-configures, self-optimizes, and migrates self-heals.
Q4. Why should partners consider EU hosting instead of US?
For EU companies, the GDPR is quite an important point. Keeping data within the EU is very important. Moreover latencies and just the psychological idea of having them close by are important factors as well.
Q5. What's the benefit of using a standard S3 api instead of something handrolled (or even something legacy like WebDAV or FTP)?
Being compatible with tools that are Amazon Web Services ready helps to open our solution to many activities. And then it’s more secure thanks to HTTPS protocol.
Q6. For backup providers, especially in the EU looking for secure storage for their backups what is the advantage that Cynny Space can provide
Transparency: our pricing is straight forward and doesn’t entail costs to recover data, to write or just to request
Safety: data is stored with the most advanced system, built using state of the art ARM microservers
Price: our price is 1/3, 1/4 of the big players
Support: we are very customer-first oriented and problems are handled by the very engineers who created the system
Q7. Very important final question - should pineapple be on pizza?
Pizza and Pineapples should never end up in the same phrase, let alone on the same dish!
Thank you for your responses Andrea!
You can view more about Cynny Space here: https://www.cynnyspace.com/
Join Mason and Josh for a webinar focusing on all that is API related in Comet. In this we will run through the API, how to get started using it and some demo examples of usage. We will conclude the webinar with a live Q&A for API related questions.
Already this year, Comet has flown past Mars and its two moons. The next large object in the solar system is Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, discovered in 1801. Ceres’ radius is only about 2/5ths that of Pluto; but because it’s so much closer, it appears 10x to 200x larger in the night sky.
The latest long term Comet release, Ceres, is now available. Bringing 17 new features and 42 enhancements this release is packed full great improvements for your Comet environment.
18.11.0 (2018-11-19)
Changes compared to 18.9.9 Voyager
- Feature: Optional columns for current Protected Item and Storage Vault size on the Users page in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Always exclude /dev/ directory on Linux and macOS
- Fix an issue with not retrying on some network errors to S3 and S3-compatible storage
- Fix an issue with "null" when adding or editing email addresses for a user in the Comet Server web interface
- Fix a cosmetic issue with extra outlines when switching tabs on the user page in the Comet Server web interface in Firefox
- Fix a cosmetic issue with overflowing field lines when editing Schedule settings in the Comet Server web interface in Firefox
Changes compared to 18.8.7 'Deimos'
- Feature: Support FIDO U2F keys for two-factor login to the Comet Server web interface as administrator
- Feature: New custom email report system
- Feature: Support scheduled email reports for customers
- Feature: Support configuring default email reports via Policy
- Feature: Custom job search queries in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Policy option to prevent users enabling/disabling the "Allow administrator to reset password" option
- Feature: Option to disable sending scheduled email reports
- Feature: Optional columns for current Protected Item and Storage Vault size on the Users page in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Allow uploading branding files directly in the Setup Wizard in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Allow browsing snapshots for restore in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Allow defining a job filter for email reports
- Feature: Allow defining multiple email reports per recipient email address in a single user account
- Feature: Allow editing existing Mandatory Exclusions in policies in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Allow administrators to change their own security settings, passwords, and U2F registrations on the My Account page in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Diagnostic option to separate devices that were incorrectly identified as the same on Windows
- Feature: Display email queue length and success/failure statistics on the About this Server page in the Comet Server web interface
- Feature: Add optional "simple" mode to Comet Server stats API endpoint, to coalesce some redundant data points
- Enhancement: Support importing schedule names from Ahsay v6
- Enhancement: Support SQLNCLI11 provider to connect to Microsoft SQL Server instances
- Enhancement: Support MSOLEDBSQL provider to connect to Microsoft SQL Server instances mandating TLS 1.2
- Enhancement: Allow selecting multiple files in the "Add single file" dialog for "Files and Folders" Protected Items in Comet Backup
- Enhancement: Allow searching jobs by duration, time since started
- Enhancement: Allow editing existing email addresses in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Allow maximising the restore dialog window in Comet Backup
- Enhancement: Minor performance improvement for loading the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Improve performance for locating data within Spanned backends
- Enhancement: Improve performance of loading the dashboard homepage in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Improve performance and reduce memory usage for saving index files into Storage Vaults, particularly during retention passes
- Enhancement: Improve performance of loading the Protected Item editor, Storage Vault editor, and Setup Wizard in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Improve performance of starting Storage Vault operations in Comet Backup
- Enhancement: Improve performance of reusing existing tree objects in repository and of managing temporary pack files
- Enhancement: Improve performance of loading the "Select files" screen in Comet Backup
- Enhancement: Reduce memory usage required for compressing large index files
- Enhancement: Reduce memory usage needed for email reports
- Enhancement: Reduce memory usage needed to construct backup job report emails
- Enhancement: Reduce memory usage needed to load index files, construct file and directory trees during backup
- Enhancement: Reduce memory usage needed to browse files for restore in Comet Backup
- Enhancement: Change the default Requestable Destination name to "Storage provided by (your company name)"
- Enhancement: Cosmetic unify the Setup Wizard, Protected Item editor design in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Cosmetic redesign the My Account page in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Cosmetic redesign the web-based restore dialog to more closely match the Comet Backup app
- Enhancement: Cosmetic add text label to column-selection button in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Cosmetic redesign email security options in the Comet Server Setup Wizard to match more common Outlook/Thunderbird option values
- Enhancement: Cosmetic display measurement timestamps, refresh progress for bucket sizes in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Cosmetic remove TOTP box on login form (TOTP will be prompted if required)
- Enhancement: Cosmetic simplify the job query filter interface
- Enhancement: Support additional fallback methods for finding Exchange Server install directory
- Enhancement: Improve SFTP server compatibility
- Enhancement: Default to showing the most recent page of server logs in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Show fractional quota bars in the Storage Vault table in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Use newer Qt library on Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 and later. The Comet installer includes both versions and will choose automatically.
- Enhancement: Show tray icon at all times, even when Comet Backup is not logged in or only running in the background (app locked)
- Enhancement: Unify Comet Backup login credentials across all OS user accounts
- Enhancement: Add plain-text URL as extra information to AdminAccountRegenerateTotp API
- Enhancement: Record the name of your token hardware when registering U2F tokens in the Comet Server web interface
- Enhancement: Display icons for Protected Items and Storage Vaults in the job filter bar in Comet Backup
- Enhancement: Reduce CPU usage when calculating data chunk positions
- Enhancement: Hide Comet Server web interface from search engines
- Enhancement: Always exclude /dev/ directory on Linux and macOS