Double-Take Software Updates Centralized Backup, Availability Products

Provides reliable disaster recovery solutions for critical workloads that enhance remote office backup and recovery

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Double-Take Software has released Double-Take Backup and Double-Take Availability, rounding out its workload optimization product suite that provides disaster recovery and remote office/branch office (ROBO) backup and recovery solutions.

Double-Take Backup version 5.2 introduces a new approach to backup that makes it easier to continuously protect a remote or branch office’s workloads in the event of an outage, and allows a company to get its workloads back up and running rapidly by recovering them to new physical hardware or into a new virtual machines with minimal effort.

Double-Take Availability version 5.2 adds new application-aware monitoring capabilities, enhances its protection of Microsoft SQL environments. and introduces a new way of re-synchronizing protected data which can intelligently keep track of what data changed while replication was suspended, dramatically reducing re-synchronization times compared to competing solutions.

Double-Take Backup

Disasters, which are unpredictable by nature, emerge in many shapes and sizes, making it important to have a reliable backup plan in place for remote office and branch office environments. Traditionally, many businesses have used unsophisticated periodic backup solutions to protect critical systems which are expensive, complex and unreliable. These challenges are only exacerbated at branch offices and remote offices, where there is often a lack of skilled IT personnel to manage the process, as well as distance and bandwidth challenges to overcome.

Double-Take Backup introduces a new approach to remote office and branch office backup by continuously sending changes to a central location, saving time and money while offering better protection from lost data and advanced recovery capabilities.

Double-Take Backup offers continuous full server protection (OS, applications and data), eliminates backup windows and allows protected data to be sent efficiently over WAN connections to a central location. The program combines continuous replication with the ability to recover to any point-in-time (CDP).

Double-Take Backup makes it easy to recover from disasters of any size by allowing IT administrators to recover anything from individual e-mails to entire workloads (OS, applications and data) either to the original server, new physical hardware, or to a VM running on VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V.

Double-Take Backup includes file archiving capabilities with its Double-Take Cargo feature, allowing organizations to reclaim under-utilized storage in branch offices and speed the time it takes to recover after a loss.

Double-Take Availability

Downtime -- whether planned or unplanned -- causes disruption and loss of productivity for employees as well as tedious and time-consuming processes for IT managers. All host-based replication solutions on the market require protected data to be resynchronized, or re-mirrored, any time protected servers are rebooted -- a process that can take significant time. Until the protected data has resynchronized after these outages, customers’ data is vulnerable.

Double-Take Availability introduces a new way of synchronizing protected data, intelligently tracking what data has changed while replication is suspended and only sending changes to that data. This avoids the need to compare the entire dataset, which can take hours or even days with other competing solutions. Re-mirroring with Double-Take Availability takes just minutes or even seconds.

Double-Take Availability now provides support for VMware ESX v4 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2 and the ability to access the most up-to-date data immediately following a disaster, maintenance or downtime.

The product’s monitoring capabilities now include application-specific intelligence, allowing users to determine if application services are “alive” and attempt to take corrective action and initiate failover based on administrator-established policies. Support is included for popular applications such as Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint and the feature can be easily extended to support any application running on Microsoft Windows.

Application Manager Support for Cluster to Standalone protection for Microsoft SQL automates the configuration and management of SQL cluster protection to a non-clustered system at the DR site. This allows administrators using SQL Server in this way to take advantage of Application Manager capabilities such as pre-flight checking and target data verification.

More information is available at www.doubletake.com.

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