Vision Solutions Launches New Resilience Capabilities

Vision Solutions, Inc. announced the latest versions of its Double-Take Move, RecoverNow and Availability products. The updates in version 5.3 expand support for virtualised IT environments as well as providing faster and easier installation of disaster recovery solutions for virtual machines.

Highlights of the new product launches include:

• Simplified management and protection of virtual environments – Double-Take Availability 5.3 allows configuration of virtual machine (VM) protection at the host level, avoiding the need to pre-install software on VM. The replication agent is automatically injected into each protected VM at the completion of the job configuration.  The combination of host-level management and real-time byte-level replication of each VM results in efficient protection.
• Improved protection for virtual clusters – For remote availability of workloads based on Microsoft Hyper-V, Double-Take Availability now supports protection of clustered Hyper-V hosts over wide area networks. The integration of Hyper-V clustering and Double-Take real-time replication of data provides unified local availability and remote availability for Hyper-V hosts. As part of this, administrators also have the choice to set the IP address to use on the target side, providing flexibility around fail-over.
• Expanded Microsoft Exchange support – Double-Take Availability 5.3 now supports protection of Exchange 2010 in Database Availability Group (DAG) environments – this is valuable for organisations that want to implement disaster recovery for DAG installations across low-bandwidth environments. Double-Take RecoverNow 5.3 also enhances its protection of Exchange 2010 by now offering Exchange log file trimming capabilities. This ability to schedule trimming of log files on the production server is coordinated with application consistent recovery points on the repository server for the flexibility to recover from the most recent data or an earlier application-consistent snapshot.
• Updated OS support – Double-Take 5.3 now supports Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 across the Availability, RecoverNow and Move products.
• Simplified, effective Failback operations – Minimising downtime with an effective availability plan is only half the battle. Getting back to ‘how things were’, or failing back, can be just as stressful, as the process can incur its own downtime. Double-Take Availability 5.3 adds additional capabilities to both full-server failover and VM failover to reduce the potential for downtime during a failback. New within Double-Take 5.3 is support for multi-job failback tasks and enterprise-wide monitoring capabilities.
• Unified Console provides a single UI for all operations – Vision Solutions has expanded its management console functionality and unified management of all protection modes under a single screen. For organisations involved in datacentre consolidations and migrations spanning multiple sites, version 5.3 has the ability to carve up and assign pools of licenses for each location, as well as Enterprise Installation and deeper bandwidth scheduling features. Alongside this, Full-Server Failover (FFO), file and folder job types added to the management console, while the administrator can also now select one or multiple jobs to act upon. 

Alan Arnold, executive vice president and chief technology officer with Vision Solutions, said: "Double-Take version 5.3 makes it simpler to protect critical workloads, wherever they happen to be within the enterprise. It does not matter if the application is sitting on a physical or virtual server, or the destination for that data is on a local network, across a WAN or out in the cloud: Double-Take Availability provides real time replication of information changes and to any target machine. This ability to use one approach to data protection, regardless of the underlying platform is proving very popular with customers as they seek to improve and streamline their approach to business continuity and disaster recovery."

Scott VanDyke, product marketing manager with Vision Solutions, said: "The latest version of Double-Take is designed to resolve some of the biggest challenges that exist for managers of virtualised environments when it comes to disaster recovery. By simplifying the processes around deploying and managing DR solutions, customers can benefit from real-time replication and protection for their virtual machines."

Mark Di Ciano, director with MDCnet Computers, said: "Double-Take Availability is a very easy to use and reliable disaster recovery solution for replicating virtual machines across a LAN or WAN. The software is simple to install and administer through the centralised console using wizards and a logical user interface. The replication engine has minimal impact on the performance of the hosts and our Hyper-V 5.3 virtual machines, and it recovers well after unexpected failures on the cluster without any loss of data or downtime to the production system."