Double-Take 5.0 Combines Continuous Rata Replication and Server Protection

Double-Take Software announced Double-Take 5.0, an innovative platform upgrade to its industry leading replication and recovery products. Double-Take 5.0 is the only disaster recovery product to combine continuous data replication and full server protection: a combination that eliminates the need to install and maintain applications, patches and configurations on the standby server for disaster recovery.
Furthermore, the new Full-Server Failover feature allows customers to use Double-Take for quick and painless migrations between different types of server hardware or virtual machines.

"With enterprises migrating data to virtual environments where more data is on fewer servers, it becomes even more crucial for enterprises to protect these valuable assets and applications from outside attacks, internal glitches and disasters," said Noemi Greyzdorf, research manager at International Data Corp. "Double-Take Software’s new offering with Double-Take 5.0 only continues to advance itself in this market."

Automated Full-Server Failover

One of the product’s new features, Full-Server Failover, drastically reduces the complexity of setting up a standby system for failover and reduces the burden on IT administrators to continually maintain that system as changes and updates are made to the production server. The feature can be used to streamline protection for any application running on a Microsoft Windows
server and does not require pre-installation or configuration of any application software on the standby server. In addition, the Full-Server Failover feature can be used to protect critical servers in local (LAN) and remote (WAN) environments, and supports both 32 and 64-bit operating systems. More importantly, this full-server protection is hardware independent – the standby system does not need to be the same make, model or configuration and can even be virtualized to reduce the cost and complexity of disaster recovery.

"We have peace of mind knowing that not only is our data protected, but our operating system and applications are protected as well," said Jeff Reynolds, MIS manager, Alaska Tanker. "In the event of an outage, our business can be up and running in a matter of minutes without data loss or disruption to our normal workflow."

"Every organization knows they should protect their business-critical systems from unwanted downtime.  The challenge to-date has been that implementing protection has come at the cost of needing to configure and maintain their disaster recovery environment.  This ‘protection tax’ requires that they keep their disaster recovery servers’ operating systems,
applications and configuration in lock-step with their production environment which can be a costly effort," said Bob Roudebush, director of solutions engineering for Double-Take Software. "With Double-Take 5.0 and features like Full-Server Failover, we’re repealing the ‘protection tax’ for our customers and providing them the ability to protect or migrate entire
servers easily all while the production workload remains available. This allows them to devote their time and resources to more worthwhile efforts while still remaining protected in the event of a disaster."

On Demand Migration

Double-Take 5.0’s innovative full-server protection and recovery technology provides customers with a flexible approach to server migrations. The new Full-Server Failover technology also allows customers to move entire workloads, including operating systems, applications and data, from one server to another in both the physical and virtual realms. Using
Double-Take, IT administrators can perform real-time migrations to dissimilar hardware while servers are running with minimal impact to end-user productivity.  Once migrations are complete, customers can continue to use Double-Take to protect and recover their migrated workloads moving forward.   

"By purchasing Double-Take, we’re getting four products in one: replication, failover, migration, and a physical to virtual and virtual to virtual migration tool," said Matthew Blydenburgh, chief information officer, Tannenbaum Helpern Syracuse & Hirschtritt, LLP.  "After we use Double-Take to migrate, we can then use Double-Take to protect and recover our business critical systems."

Automated Microsoft SharePoint Services Protection

Double-Take 5.0 provides automated protection and recovery for Microsoft SharePoint Services. Both the SQL data used by SharePoint and the SharePoint application configuration are continuously replicated to a standby server and can automatically failover within a few minutes of a system outage.  With these enhancements, Double-Take 5.0 is the easiest way
to protect and recover organisations’ business-critical SharePoint Services data.

In summary, key new features include:

Full-Server protection and failover

Automated Microsoft SharePoint Services protection

Flexible and easy migration between physical and virtual machines and
between dissimilar hardware

Enhancements to Microsoft Exchange 2007 Cluster protection

Enterprise Install Console for centralised and automated deployment/upgrade
of Double-Take

Advanced Scripting

Enhanced restore capabilities

Double-Take Software