Workload Optimization Suite by Double-Take

Data centre disasters are every IT manager’s worst nightmare; but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Managing today’s complex IT workloads entails more than just data recovery. Workload management encompasses the hardware, operating systems, applications and data that underpin an organisation’s IT backbone — an infrastructure that is more critical than ever for ensuring seamless business operations and, at the same time, is increasingly harder to manage.  In response to these business continuity challenges, Double-Take Software, Inc. announced a new Workload Optimisation suite designed to meet customers’ workload portability, backup and availability needs. This suite includes four products:  Double-Take Move, Double-Take Flex, Double-Take Back-up and Double-Take Availability.    

“We’re aligning our business to best meet our customers’ evolving technology needs. Our new Workload Optimisation suite exemplifies Double-Take Software’s focus on providing highly functional, non-intrusive software to an overloaded IT department looking to reduce costs,” said Dean Goodermote, CEO at Double-Take Software. “It represents our affordable approach to meeting customers’ migration, availability, backup and recovery needs.”

All of Double-Take Software’s flagship products have been unified around the new Workload Optimisation suite, and have been enhanced with new features, functionality and licensing options. These product offerings are affordable, simple to use, and allow IT managers to easily migrate, backup, protect and more flexibly run physical and virtual workloads across their enterprises, regardless of OS, hardware or location.  

The suite’s key capabilities include:

• Workload Migration (Double-Take Move): Move workloads between any combination of physical and virtual hardware (P2P, P2V, V2P or V2V) within data centres for hardware refreshes, or across locations for data centre migrations and consolidations.
• 
  Workload Backup (Double-Take Backup)
  : Continuously backup workloads and recover them on-demand to a new physical or virtual machine.  Using CDP capabilities, recovery can also be done at the item level to any point in time.
• Workload Availability (Double-Take Availability): Ensure the availability of critical IT workloads for disaster recovery and business continuity using real-time replication and failover that can protect individual applications, entire servers or virtualised workloads running on VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V.
• Workload Flexibility (Double-Take Flex): Easily manage any workload by booting it from iSCSI SANs, regardless of hardware.

“Traditional backup and recovery markets have been moving towards continuous replication while continuous replication markets have been moving towards traditional backup and recovery,” said Donna Scott, vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner, Inc. “Add virtualisation to the mix and it spells confusion and complexity to customers. Customers can benefit with one set of tools that reduces the complexity in managing their availability, protection and migration needs.”

The new Double-Take Move and Double-Take Flex products are available today. Backup and availability products are also available today under the Double-Take, Livewire, TimeData and GeoCluster brands. Later this year, these products will be folded into the new Double-Take Backup and Double-Take Availability product suites, which will also include new features and functionality.
 
“We are currently using the Double-Take Virtual Recovery Assistant to perform server migrations from physical to virtual and virtual to virtual servers. This gives us the ability to keep legacy software we are still using while we perform necessary EOL replacement of critical boxes,” said Paul Hurst, Network Administrator for the City of Airdrie, Canada. “While this is an excellent product that we have had great success with, I am very excited to begin using Double-Take Move, which will make our migrations even easier and more affordable and allow us to migrate workloads locally or over the WAN.”

About Double-Take Move and Double-Take Flex

Double-Take Move
Server migrations are complex, time-consuming and expensive. Disparate hardware requires manual configuration, while data and applications are offline during moves. IT staff members are trapped in the office on weekends trying to make it all work.  

Double-Take Move streamlines the traditional migration process with real-time data movement and hardware-independent conversion technology that make workloads simple for administrators to move — and minimises the impact on user productivity. By using WAN-friendly, real-time data replication to move workloads, migrating across the country is as easy as migrating between servers in the same location.  Double-Take Move simplifies server and storage migration for administrators and works on any Windows server, regardless of the underlying server hardware, storage architecture, and operating system, including between any combination of physical and virtual hardware (P2P, P2V, V2P or V2V).

In addition to including all of the current Double-Take migration functionality, Double-Take Move features a management console that consolidates multiple migration features into one interface, creating a much simpler workflow. Double-Take Move also includes a flexible licensing and pricing structure that enables customers to choose the migration model that best suits their needs:  purchase perpetual-use migration licenses, or purchase copies on a per-migration basis.  

Double-Take Flex
With rising server management, call centre support and maintenance costs, managing IT workloads can consume an organisation’s precious resources.  By integrating the company’s netBoot/i and sanFly into one product, Double-Take Flex reduces the time and expense of desktop and server provisioning and management, while increasing the level of control companies have over their current infrastructure.  

Double-Take Flex enables existing Ethernet NICs within desktop or servers systems to perform diskless booting from any iSCSI SAN.  Systems can be deployed, provisioned and re-provisioned quickly and as needed. Additionally, Double-Take Flex can turn storage on any Windows server into an iSCSI SAN. This can allow multiple servers or workstations to boot from a single shared boot volume to save storage space and provide fast provisioning of new systems. It provides IT managers with the ability to centrally manage physical and virtual workloads and to easily deploy, configure, back-up and secure large numbers of desktops/servers within an enterprise. 

New capabilities in this product include:

• Improved manageability – control storage management and booting from a single console
• Client auto-discovery to make it easier to manage thousands of systems
• Automation capabilities that allow customers or 3rd-party developers to seamlessly integrate Double-Take Flex into custom workflows or tools.