Oil Falls for a Sixth Day on Sufficient Supplies, Slow Recovery

Crude oil fell for a sixth day, the longest losing streak in a month, on concern supplies are more than sufficient to meet demand as the pace of global economic recovery may be slow.

Oil traded below $78 a barrel after Qatar’s Energy Minister Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah said yesterday the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries won’t change its output quotas because markets are well-stocked. Consumer confidence in the U.S., the world’s biggest energy user, rose less than forecast in January, missing the median economist estimate.

“It looks like a little bit of a swing in sentiment,” said Mark Pervan, senior commodity strategist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. in Melbourne. “The market’s been held up by some sentiment issues and some less-solid fundamental factors such as some of the economic data and some of the weather forecasts. The hard supply and demand numbers behind it really don’t hold up all that strongly.”

Crude oil for February delivery fell as much as 93 cents, or 1.2 percent, to $77.07 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract, which expires Jan. 20, was at $77.87 a barrel at 3:20 p.m. in Singapore. The more widely traded March futures lost 15 cents to $78.22 a barrel.

Prices dropped 5.7 percent last week, the first weekly decline in five, after U.S. crude oil and refined-product stockpiles rose and temperatures climbed.

The Reuters/University of Michigan preliminary index of U.S. consumer sentiment increased to 72.8 from 72.5 in December. It was forecast to strengthen to 74, according to the median of 68 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. JPMorgan Chase & Co., the first of the largest U.S. banks to post fourth-quarter earnings, Jan. 15 reported a loss in retail banking.

‘Real Fundamentals’

“People are coming back to real fundamentals, and really suggesting that perhaps we are awash with some commodities and we just don’t have economic performance to substantiate” higher prices, Jonathan Barratt, managing director at Commodity Broking Services Pty in Sydney, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “We’re seeing adverse weather conditions ease, we’re seeing inventories once again build.”

U.S. distillate fuel stockpiles, including heating oil and diesel, increased in the week ended Jan. 8, snapping a four-week drawdown, according to the Energy Department. Crude oil and gasoline inventories climbed for a second week.

Temperatures in the U.S. northeast, which consumes four- fifths of the country’s heating oil, will probably be above average through Jan. 27, according to the National Weather Service. Oil rallied 4.3 percent in the first 10 days of 2010 as demand for heating fuels gained during a cold snap.

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Low Cost Professional Data Recovery Service

SF Bay Area Low Cost Data Recovery, a renowned data recovery company is please to announce its hard drive data recovery services at very affordable prices. Through their easy to use website they cater to the needs of the people by offering them straightforward, honest, low cost, professional data recovery services.With their "No Data No Pay Guarantee" they enable their customers to hire a uniquely skilled data recovery professional to evaluate and diagnose their hard drive absolutely free. They provide same services to their customers but at up to one-tenth of the prices in comparison of other top companies. Their professional services on hard drive data recovery enables their customers to save immensely on data recovery. It also provides free return shipping.

This company offers manifold services catering to the needs of their customers. They deal with minor logical problems, media defects which include low cost data recovery, external hard drive, and internal hard drive failures. It also recovers more severe hard drive failures like maintenance track problems and hard disk failures such as head problems.

Their data recovery group recovers hard disk data of various brands including Samsung, Hitachi, Maxtor, IBM, Toshiba, Western Digitals, Seagate and Quantum Drives. They recover desktop data recovery of brands including HP, Dell, Acer, Toshiba, Sony, Lenovo and Compaq. They also specialize in Mac Data Recovery also known as Apple Macintosh.

This company strongly recommends their customers to stop using their hard drive if they experience a hard disk failure because using it may decrease its chances of recovery and cause further damage. They also recommend to "never" to hit, shake, tap or smack a hard drive as this might result in further damage or even non recoverability. Here every data recovery is sent directly to a company engineer who always runs the whole process from the beginning till the end.


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Russia's 3rd mth of flat prices seen heralding rate cut

Russia is on track for a third month of zero inflation in October, data showed on Wednesday, paving the way for the central bank to administer more economy-boosting interest rate cuts in the near future.

Prices were flat for the eighth week in a row in the period to Oct. 26, the Federal Statistics Service said, estimating that for the whole of October inflation was also likely to be zero.Prices were also flat overall on the month in August.

The central bank has pledged to press on with rate cuts if inflation keeps falling, as it seeks to put the economy on a solid recovery path from its first recession in a decade.

'We expect interest rates to be cut again this week, as inflation maintains its pace of 0 percent growth,' analysts at UniCredit said in a research note.

Russia has already reduced the benchmark refinancing rate by 300 basis points since April to 10.00 percent.


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Primus, Juniper and NetApp Take Firewall, Rapid Data Recovery to SMBs

Primus Business Services has reportedly partnered with Juniper Networks (News - Alert) and NetApp to enhance its array of managed services and also to bring firewall technology and rapid data recovery to small and medium businesses.

Primus is a national full service communications provider offering voice, data, hosting, IP connectivity, disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. Juniper deals in high-performance networking. NetApp offers storage and data management solutions.
Under the deal, Primus will be able to offer Juniper's SSG series products that are integrated with Unified Threat Management firewall features. The UTM firewall offers businesses protection against inbound and outbound attacks at all levels and antivirus, anti-spam, and Web filtering options, as well
Primus is of the opinion that SMBs’ IT managers can’t afford to leave their networks vulnerable by focusing only on protection against a single type of attack and their new partnership with Juniper will enable SMBs to outsource firewall service and enjoy secure, around the clock management and monitoring of firewall devices at a fraction of the cost of doing it themselves.
Juniper said that Primus is leveraging their high-performance network infrastructure to drive security and threat monitoring to one of Canada's most important businesses markets - small and medium sized companies. Primus can help its SMB clients conduct critical transactions through the internet safely and securely through Juniper’s firewalls.
The collaboration with NetApp will allow Primus to make use of NetApp’s SnapVault and OSSV technology to offer its clients with the most up-to-date technology in data recovery services. SnapVault has been designed to safeguard data faster and more cost effectively and to leverage disk-based backup and block-level incremental for reliable, low-overhead backup and recovery. OSSV increases performance and enables more frequent data protection by moving and creating backups from changed data blocks, not entire changed files. And since only changed blocks are stored, less capacity is needed.
Jeff Lorenz, vice president sales and marketing at Primus Telecommunications (News - Alert) Canada, said that SMBs will now be able to enjoy operational and financial benefits that come as a result of Primus' managed business continuity services. Time and money are wasted by companies on lost data, and Primus and NetApp can help SMBs improve their backup and recovery speeds by up to 92 percent, enable more cost effective backups and simplify all aspects of their data protection with the SnapVault option.
NetApp said that Primus has partnered with them to deliver differentiated solutions to the Canadian marketplace and to bring NetApp Data Protection capabilities to small and medium size businesses with the same data protection requirements as larger organizations but without the dedicated storage administration staff.


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The Recovery Is Beginning to Take Shape

We believe the recession ended around the middle of this year and that a recovery has begun to take hold. Real GDP is expected to rise at a 3.4 percent pace in the third quarter and average a 3.0 percent pace for the second half of this year. The improved outlook reflects recent revisions to the underlying GDP data and a sharp reduction in inventories. The initial success of the cash for clunkers trade-in program has also bolstered our outlook for consumer spending. Aside from these changes, our forecast remains close to its earlier track.

Private domestic demand is expected to remain weak throughout the first year of the recovery, averaging just a 1.0 percent pace. Consumer spending will be constrained by rising unemployment, sluggish income growth, declines in household wealth and higher taxes, particularly at the state and local level. Outlays for plant and equipment will also take some time to recover. Businesses are awash in excess capacity and continue to focus on strengthening their balance sheets. Commercial construction will be another drag on economic activity during the early part of the recovery but homebuilding appears set to make a slight positive contribution to growth.

The sluggish start to the economic recovery should allow the Federal Reserve to keep short-term interest rates on hold through the middle of next year. Once the risks of the economy backsliding have passed, the Fed will move quickly to bring the federal funds rate back to a neutral level.

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Managed IT services for disaster recovery and business continuity

Midmarket CIOs are signing on to managed IT services for disaster recovery (DR) planning and business continuity (BC) services. With the right DR/BC plan in place, employees can begin working as soon as possible in the event of a disaster. But finding the appropriate strategy, and focusing the business around it, can be a challenge.
From weighing the risks and benefits of using managed IT services for disaster recovery and business continuity plans to understanding available options and contract terms, get the low-down on DR/BC services.

For free advice and resources on more IT and business topics, visit our list of Midmarket CIO Briefings.


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Top 10 Tips for Data Recovery

What would happen to your business if you experienced a catastrophic data loss? Would your business survive? The statistics are alarming, 43% of businesses never re-open after a major disaster.

A well planned data recovery strategy can deliver improved resilience with predictable costs and no unscheduled downtime. It will also allow you to sleep at night!

Below are some points to consider when compiling your Data Recovery plan.

1. Identify your data recovery needs
Data Recovery is vital for the survival of your business. Your data defines and separates your business from any other in the market. If failure should occur at any level of your infrastructure it can be felt across the business. You must ask yourself, how would your business survive a disaster? And what provisions do you have in place for your business to continue after?

2. Understand the risks
Data loss can range from the accidental deletion of files; to the failure of your entire site. Without data recovery precautions in place you are putting your organisation at risk.

IT failure is considered to be the most common threat to businesses, with electrical, hardware and software failure also posing considered risks.

The threat of fire and natural disaster, although considered less likely can have the most devastating consequences. Findings from a CBI study indicate that a high level of disruptions in 2008 and 2009 were due to extreme weather incidents such as snow, flood or high winds.

3. Assess how critical your data is
The key aspect of data recovery is understanding just how critical your data is. By compiling an assessment on the risks to your business you can then develop a tiered recovery strategy that will ensure all levels of your infrastructure can be recovered in the event of a disaster.

4. Assess how easily you can recover a file
Data backup is required by all businesses. With legal requirements tightening and data volumes growing out of control, traditional tape backup is no longer a reliable or cost effective means of meeting compliance levels. Managed Online Data Backup Services enable you to instantly recover files within seconds and deduplicate data to make the most of your storage; saving resources and reducing costs. Data is encrypted during the backup process to offer the highest level of security and is ready for recovery if needed.

5. Consider what the impact of a server failure would be
Assessment for data recovery calls for you to consider the maximum amount of downtime you can afford for any system before the impact becomes critical to business operations. You can define your data recovery policy according to how critical that system is, the chance of failure and how much you are willing to spend to minimise recovery time.

6. Assess how easily you could recover your systems
The process of re-installing an operating system, its service packs and updates, along with applications and new device drivers can take hours or even days, contributing to your overall recovery time. Prior to the lengthy process of application installation and data restoration, a compatible system is required, adding yet more downtime to that ticking clock. The reality is that system failure could result in over week of downtime till your system is back up and running.

7. What is the impact of downtime on your company?
For most large organisations, to be without a particular system, such as email for any length of time could result in the loss of business. Should the system running your website fail, and customers attempt to visit an inactive site, the chances are they will not return. The longer the site is down, the more business you could potentially lose. It is vital that you can recover your systems as quickly as possible, reducing downtime and limiting loss of business. Essentially, any length of downtime can be harmful to your business, but extended downtime could spell out the end.

8. Assess what method of system recovery is best suited to your critical system
Assessing the critical levels of your specific data and systems, allows you to set a data recovery policy that works best for you depending on the Recovery Point Objective (RPI) of your data.

Bare metal recovery essentially backs up the entire system, enabling you to recover the operating system, application software and data in a single pass, reducing your recovery time by hours. This solution enables you to recover to either similar or dissimilar hardware. Online disk backup allows you to increase the frequency of your backup for more dynamic and rapidly changing data. This Real-time protection solution provides this and, with tiered recovery architecture, you have the flexibility of backing up more frequently on critical systems and less frequently on non-critical systems. This saves you money as it cost-effectively balances your data protection needs.

Another method is continuous data protection (CDP), which improves your time to recover a complete system. With CDP, you backup very rapidly across a LAN to your local vault onsite while simultaneously backing up over the wire to a vault in offsite, providing protection from on-site and natural disasters.

9. Consider how your network would survive a disaster
Putting a resilient data recovery policy in place insures your data against failure, but what about your network? Your network infrastructure is vital to continuous running of your organisation. A disaster on site will take out your network as well as your data.

Hosting your network with a service provider offers you a fully managed solution for network recovery. Your network will be accessible even in site failure, ensuring that your business continues as normal.

10. Consider how your telephony would survive a disaster
Managed hosting is the ultimate business continuity solution. Not only can you host your data, systems and network safely offsite in the service providers 'cloud'; you can also protect your telephony systems in the same way. Service providers such as InTechnology offer a portfolio of hosted cloud services to protect your entire infrastructure.

Hosting your IT infrastructure in the cloud covers every aspect for business continuity as well as allowing you access to extra computing resources when you need them. For a truly resilient business continuity solution that is flexible with your business needs, managed hosting is the answer.

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