Vision Solutions Updates Double-Take Suite

Vision Solutions, Inc., with over 25,000 customers worldwide running Windows, Linux, IBM Power Systems and cloud computing environments, launched a new release of its Double-Take suite, which includes Double-Take Availability, Double-Take Move, and Double-Take RecoverNow (formerly Double-Take Backup). The enhancements to the suite make it easier for users to migrate, protect and recover their systems running in a range of environments – especially those where virtualization is enabled. These enhancements also add product versatility, bolster performance and continue to make the Double-Take suite of products easier to administer.

These enhancements are the first to be rolled out to Double-Take products since Vision Solutions finalized its acquisition of Double-Take Software in July.

New Features to Protect Virtualized Environments
Across the Double-Take Suite of Products:

• The Vision Solutions Double-Take product suite now supports the VMware vSphere 4.1 release for auto-provisioned virtual machines.
• Users can automatically choose dynamic disks or fixed disks for automatically provisioned virtual servers, which provides the ability to automatically create the disk type needed to optimize the performance of virtual machines in their environment. This feature is provided for both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.
• Double-Take now supports the vSphere feature Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS). This update allows DVS users to realize simplified virtual machine networking and take advantage of DVS capabilities while maintaining Double-Take protection of their virtual machines.
• When virtual disks are created as part of the auto-provisioning process, Double-Take will ensure that partitions of the disk are aligned along 64K boundaries for improved I/O performance on data volumes. This Double-Take feature is provided for both vSphere and Hyper-V environments.

Key New Features
for Specific Products Within the Suite:

Specific Double-Take Availability Key Features:

• Added support for SQL 2008 R2 provides users with confidence that Double-Take Availability can protect the most recent versions of SQL in their environments.
• Double-Take Availability now provides cluster support for host level virtualization protection in environments where the source is a cluster that contains virtual machines. With this feature, customers can use Double-Take Availability to move virtual machines from node to node on the source cluster and Double-Take will reconnect the job after the move takes place.
• Double-Take Availability auto-provisioned virtual failover allows users to specify the IP/DNS/Gateway for the virtual machines to use after failover as part of the protection workflow. This allows users to proactively manage virtual machines during a failover.

Specific Double-Take Move Key Features:

• Double-Take Move provides support for migrations to the cloud so that users can easily and seamlessly migrate from physical and virtual servers to and from the cloud. Administrators can use this capability to reduce storage overhead, reduce hardware costs, or provide an easy to use method for switching cloud providers.
• Users can schedule bandwidth usage directly from the Double-Take Move management console, improving the product’s job setup process and overall ease of use.

Specific Double-Take RecoverNow
(formerly Double-Take Backup) Key Features:

• Vision Solutions unveils a Virtual Unlimited Host License option with this new version of Double-Take RecoverNow. This is an agent licensing option for virtual environments and allows an unlimited number of production virtual machines to be protected on a single host.
• The product offers enhanced file-level deduplication which reduces the total cost of ownership of disk-based protection by lowering disk consumption on the repository server.
• Double-Take RecoverNow provides improved bandwidth scheduling capabilities which add to the product’s overall ease of use.

Rob Beeler, vice president of research and development, Vision Solutions, Inc., said: "This latest release of the Double-Take suite further expands our ability to protect and migrate a broad range of environments, including virtual, physical and cloud configurations. IT managers today are faced with ever-changing infrastructure requirements, and we help them keep their workloads available and customers happy regardless of the technologies they choose. As more and more of our customers are considering moving some aspects of their IT infrastructure and data to the cloud, this new suite offers users the ability to easily migrate from physical and virtual servers to and from the cloud."

Jeremy Scott, vice president of technology at CB&S Bank, said: "We chose Double-Take Availability because of how it simplified migrations within our environment. I was extremely impressed with how easy set up and installation was; it was literally point and click."