Double-Take 6.0 Expands Business Continuity Services

Vision Solutions, Inc. announced Double-Take 6.0, a ‘Simply Evolved’ solution for application and data protection in virtual, cloud and physical computing environments.

It helps companies protect profitability and reputation by providing real-time asynchronous data replication, enabling recovery from any system outage.

It has six critical attributes:

• Ease of Use – The initial set up and ongoing management is automated allowing IT service teams to set it and forget it.
• Plug & Play Protection – A pre-configured universal virtual recovery appliance provides options for extending virtualized environments.
• Real-Time Replication – Complete replication in real-time instead of snapshots ensures uninterrupted availability and virtually eliminates data loss.
• No Downtime Migrations – Replication technology allows users to remain active while production environments are recreated on new systems.
• Platform Independence – This solution is hardware and storage independent and works with different hardware and storage on both ends. And, it also can protect any application.
• Simplified Management – A unified console provides a single window into the availability environment.

Double-Take 6.0 offers the following new features:

• Point-in-time recovery for P2V environments – Operating alongside real-time data replication, point-in-time recovery allows customers to set up and manage scheduled VSS snapshots for protected environments across Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware platforms.
• Universal Virtual Recovery Appliance – Preconfigured virtual software appliance that automates the installation and configuration of availability environments. Auto-provisioning of the virtual environment needed to support the Universal Virtual Recovery Appliance saves time and reduces errors.
• Protection for Hyper-V virtual machines with CSV – Support for Hyper-V machines using Clustered Shared Volumes, including one-click failover and reverse allowing users to move VMs between hosts as required.
• Application protection workflows – Built-in, application-specific workflows operated from the new unified Management Console protect key applications, such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, and virtualization platforms, such as VMware and Hyper-V.
• Support for PowerShell – Enables users to manage and automate tasks using PowerShell, Microsoft’s task-based automation scripting language.

Double-Take 6.0 is Vision Solutions’ offering for Windows and Linux, developed from more than 20 years’ experience providing availability services and protection to businesses and partners, with more than 25,000 customers running Windows, Linux, IBM Power Systems and cloud computing environments.

Alan Arnold, CTO, Vision Solutions, said: "The pace and competitive landscape of today’s global commerce dictates the need for flexible resilient and available IT infrastructure that provides around-the-clock access to applications and information. Interruptions in data or downtime for systems and applications are threats to business operations that can impact revenue, customer relationships and an organization’s reputation. With Double-Take’s real-time replication and failover technology, we ultimately help companies save data, revenue and even jobs."

Jean S. Bozman, research VP, IDC, said: "Achieving the level of high availability required to support today’s mission-critical systems on virtualized x86 architecture is placing new demands on IT and data center professionals," said Jean S. Bozman, Research VP, IDC Enterprise Platforms Group. "Using a unified control panel for data replication, supporting multiple platforms across the datacenter, is a strong way to reduce IT costs and management costs associated with business continuity."

Russell Fitzpatrick, senior systems administrator, The Active Network, Inc., said: "Double-Take 6.0 demonstrates once again Vision Solutions’ commitment to helping our organization ensure business resiliency and improve our processes for competitive advantage. Their affordable data protection and no downtime migration products enable us to recover immediately from any system outage and perform system migrations without having to take the system offline. This enables us to safeguard not only profitability but our reputation in the industry."