Virtualization for disaster recovery is one of the fastest-growing technologies in mainstream Information Technology (IT) today. Market-leaders like VMware and Microsoft are pushing this growth by placing increasing focus on providing customers with the ability to consolidate servers and easily deploy development and test environments. The benefit of virtualization technologies is clearly evident - they allow businesses to improve their IT efficiency while continuing to drive down costs.

As you evolve your IT infrastructures and leverage virtualization to help address your scalability and manageability needs, it is important that you also evolve your data protection strategy as well. Double-Take meets this challenge by providing proven, reliable disaster recovery and high availability capabilities that work just as well in virtual systems as they do on their physical counterparts.

When you combine the accessible data protection capabilities of Double-Take with the flexibility and efficiency of virtual systems, you have the best technologies for building a cost-effective disaster recovery solution. Therefore, you will have no excuse for not keeping your company's most valuable asset - it's data - safe:

• Double-Take can protect data from either the Host OS (protecting all of the virtual systems on a server) or the Guest OS (protecting the same way as physical servers).
• Double-Take can provide continuous data protection of the virtual systems and fail them over to another physical host within minutes.
• Leveraging virtual systems at the disaster recovery site, one can deploy fewer physical servers and provide autonomous virtual targets for each client / business.

Due to its patented architecture and feature set, Double-Take is the proven leader in real-time data protection and disaster recovery for virtual systems. Download the Double-Take for Virtual Systems data sheet today (PDF).

Learn more about our virtual systems replication software by requesting a free trial evaluation of Double-Take, the leading virtual systems replication software for continuous data protection and cost-effective recovery options.

Double-Take Software is the standard in protecting virtual environments. Double-Take provides the most affordable data protection and failover solutions for disaster recovery, high availability and centralised backup.

Virtual server technologies provide businesses and IT departments with the ability to do more with less, enabling the consolidation of data and applications onto a single server. The result is reduced costs, simplified IT management, and minimized space requirements. The need to protect these virtualizes systems is paramount as they are running multiple business-critical applications, requiring a higher level of protection.

Consider the impact of a failure of a virtualizes system. Instead of incurring downtime of just one application, you will incur downtime of multiple applications. Virtual machine technologies require advanced disaster recovery and availability solutions that provide protection against data loss and downtime for the entire environment.

Double-Take from Double-Take Software delivers enterprise-class disaster recovery and high availability solutions for these cutting-edge virtual environments. Double-Take is the industry-leading replication and availability solution that offers local and long-distance protection against most any outage, from a failed power supply to a regional disaster. Double-Take for Virtual Systems is the industry's first disaster recovery and availability solution designed for virtual server environments.

Your tape backup solution can provide for the long-term archival needs of the virtual servers; however tape cannot provide the level of recoverability required for critical business applications. Rebuilding one application from tape can be a difficult and lengthy process. Having to recover four or more applications at the same time from tape to rebuild the one physical server will result in an excessive period of downtime, likely more than the business can afford. Double-Take replication solutions are the perfect complement to existing tape backup solutions, delivering a much quicker recovery time with minimal to no loss of data.

Double-Take can also maintain availability of the virtual servers by providing failover monitoring and client redirection to a standby server to minimize lost productivity. Double-Take for Virtual Systems provides the same world class protection for your virtual servers that you have come to rely on for your physical servers. With the flexibility and robust feature set of Double-Take, you can implement the solutions that ensure these virtual environments are protected from data loss and downtime.

Double-Take® Software is the standard in protecting virtual environments. Double-Take provides the most affordable data protection and failover solutions for disaster recovery, high availability and centralized backup.

View a PPT presentation on Data Protection Strategies for Virtualization.

The implementation of virtual servers enables businesses to better meet the ever-growing demands on budgets and resources. You need a data protection solution that is able to seamlessly integrate with your particular configurations without fail. The flexibility of Double-Take allows for a virtual source, target, or both, allowing for the protection of virtual servers as well as using a virtual server as the replica target for a cost effective DR solution.

Cost-effective Disaster Recovery for Virtual Environments

Protecting the data on a virtual machine is absolutely crucial. Double-Take for Virtual Systems deploys easily within each virtual session to protect each individual application independently. Options include replicating all virtual sessions to a single physical server or to a virtual server. The patented Double-Take architecture allows you to design and implement the solution that's right for your business.

Learn more about our virtual systems replication software by requesting a free trial evaluation of Double-Take, the leading virtual systems replication software for continuous data protection and cost-effective recovery options.

Double-Take Software is the standard in protecting virtual environments. Double-Take provides the most affordable data protection and failover solutions for disaster recovery, high availability and centralised backup.
 

Shorenstein Company LLC: After speaking with many vendors including SteelEye, Comdisco, and Veritas, Shorenstein Company LLC made the decision to install Double Take. Double-Take allowed Shorenstein to create a remote site where data and applications could be continually replicated from 15 remote servers to ensure business continuity.

MassHousing: MassHousing had two fundamental challenges - 24x7 data access and support for a highly-complex IT infrastructure that includes SQL, Progress, Pervasive and Exchange, as well as a virtual environment featuring products from VMware. In the event of a system failure that prohibited access to data, MassHousing would not be able to provide any customer service, would be unable to transfer funds or share data with banks and would paralyze its own staff from completing its day-to-day work. In other words, data loss would necessitate a virtual shut-down of operations. To avert this, MassHousing selected Double-Take.

Suffolk University: When Suffolk University made the strategic decision to establish a new online learning presence, data protection and application availability became essential. With thousands of students using their new, online services model each day, a system failure that prohibited access to online data and services, would stifle the education of thousands of students from around the globe. To meet their needs, Suffolk selected Double-Take®.

Learn more about Cost-effective disaster recovery for virtual Environments now through  on-demand webinars.

• Webinar: Data Protection Strategies for Virtualization: Reliable and Cost Effective Disaster Recovery and High Availability Solutions

Virtual Disaster Recovery and High Availability Solutions for Cost-Effective Recovery

Implementing a cost-effective disaster recovery solution can be simplified using virtual technologies and result in a much lower overall cost. Because most applications typically require their own dedicated server, providing high availability or failover protection to these applications requires a dedicated target server. With Double-Take each application can replicate and fail over to a dedicated virtual session on a single physical server, eliminating the need to deploy and manage multiple target machines. The result is a very high level of application protection and availability at a much lower TCO. Virtual server solutions offer improved efficiency and lower IT costs. Double-Take for Virtual Systems was developed specifically for virtual environments to offer businesses advanced solutions for protecting these highly valuable servers.

• Flexible configuration options - Replicate from and to a virtual environment.
• Continuous, asynchronous, byte-level replication - Double-Take monitors changes to all protected files and replicates only the actual bytes that change.
• Unlimited distance replication - Replicate to a disaster recovery site as far away from your production server as you would like, over standard IP networks, for maximum protection against data loss from regional crises and other disasters.
• Supports leading virtual technologies including VMware ESX and GSX server and Microsoft Virtual Server.
• Hardware independent - The flexibility to choose best-of-breed hardware and software as your enterprise grows.
• Application independent - Patented STAR (sequential transfer asynchronous replication) technology enables complete data protection integrity for virtually any application.
• Certified Windows compatibility - Double-Take is certified for all editions of Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000.
• Exclusive resource planning tool - Simulate your replication solution and estimate the bandwidth you'll need to go live.
• Flexible Bandwidth Scheduling - Impose higher or lower network usage limits during those times when most appropriate for your business. Limit network use of Double-Take during busy work hours and increase or remove these limits during non-peak times for very efficient replication with the least amount of impact on production resources.
• High availability and failover - To maintain availability of virtual servers
• Integrate with existing backup solutions - Use replicated data to perform remote backups and snapshots at any time without impacting your production server.
• Queued task processing - Insert commands in the replication queue to automatically trigger remote backups, snapshots, or other tasks at specific times or in response to specific application events.
• Uses standard network protocols - Replicate over any existing IP network - LAN,WAN, VPN or NAT - so you can deploy without additional infrastructure costs.
• Many-to-one failover - Allow multiple production servers to use the same target server.
• Intelligent Data Compression - Improve performance and reduce network usage by compressing only the data that will benefit.
• Protect Exchange, NAS, SAN and more - and bulletproof your business continuity, data migration, centralized backup, and server consolidation operations.

Double-Take Software and VMware

Double-Take® Software and VMware® provide proven protection for multiple production application servers by leveraging real-time data protection and virtualization technologies to create cost-effective, simplified disaster recovery architectures. Simply put, VMware virtual machines enable Double-Take to replicate application data from multiple production servers to a single disaster recovery target and failover to the disaster recovery target in the event of an outage. VMware software can be used with Double-Take to provide solutions for challenging high availability and disaster recovery problems.

Double Take and VMware software can be used together to provide robust protection solutions:

• The most common customer need is to protect unique and sometimes conflicting applications on multiple servers to a single recovery server. While Double-Take inherently supports this many-to-one model for data protection, certain applications cannot co-exist on the same server due to conflicts or operational requirements, thus limiting the high availability options. By leveraging virtual machines on the target platform, each failed source can be protected and made available by an independent virtual machine target.
• Isolating data into secure locations and restricting unauthorized access is a priority for outsourcing providers and their customers that are looking for outsourced disaster recovery hot-site services or other off-site vaulting of data. This can be a significant challenge without purchasing separate physical machines for each client. And purchasing separate physical systems for each client quickly becomes cost prohibitive. By using designated virtual machines for each customer, data can be isolated from other customers while still allowing the hot-site provider to use their physical servers and floor space in the most efficient way possible.
• Similarly, some enterprise customers also have a need to segment servers, perhaps for security reasons, by business unit. This can be accomplished by designating separate virtual machines as independent Double-Take targets. In both of these cases, the server virtualization software from VMware ensures autonomy, while Double-Take provides efficient data protection and failover to the alternate data sites.

VMWorld 2006 Presentation

Bob Roudebush spoke about "High Availabiity and Disaster Recovery of Physical and Virtual Environments using VMware ESX Server and Double-Take for Virtual Systems." View the presentation now. (PPT)

Disaster Recovery and High Availability with Double-Take

What Our Customers Are Saying:

“The performance of Double-Take has enabled us to go about business as usual so that system outages – if they occur – are essentially transparent to the students and faculty who use our online platform. If a primary server goes down in Boston, we now have the capability to minimize the disruption to seconds. Double-Take provides a much needed buffer for our small IT staff.” Dr. Praneeth Machettira, Online Technical Director, Suffolk University Business School

“Currently, we have nine production servers replicating data to four ESX hosted virtual servers for disaster recovery purposes. Utilizing Double-Take in conjunction with VMware enabled us to consolidate our disaster recovery environment and ensure a cost-effective approach to protecting our systems and data.” Thad Darcy, User Support Specialist, Massachusetts Housing Financing Agency

“We have 25 Windows servers including 5 SQL servers in production in San Francisco, replicating with   Double-Take to a VMware server in New York. I can’t imagine how we could have implemented anything else as effective for disaster recovery. Double-Take and VMware are true solution providers, not just software companies. Our executives demanded the best in disaster protection for our organization. This combination was it.” Kenny Tam, Network Manager, Shorenstein Realty Services, LP 
 

Double-Take for Complete Disaster Recovery: Real People. Real Stories. Real Choices

Two Double-Take Software customers, W&T Offshore and MassHousing, have shared their data protection and disaster recovery stories here.

A Day in the Life of W&T Offshore — Hurricane: Katrina
Reid Lea, Executive Vice President,
Interviewed by: Bob Roudebush, Director of Solutions Engineering for Double-Take Software
To listen now, click here.

About W&T Offshore: W&T Offshore is an independent oil and natural gas company focused primarily in the Gulf of Mexico area, including the deep water. They are headquartered in Houston, Texas and trade on the NYSE under the symbol "WTI".

A Day in the life of MassHousing — Disaster Recovery Planning
Thaddeus Darcy, Systems Administrator
Interviewed by: Bob Roudebush, Director of Solutions Engineering for Double-Take Software
To listen now, click here.

About MassHousing: MassHousing provides affordable housing resources in Massachusetts. Their purpose is to provide home ownership and rental housing opportunities for Massachusetts residents with low and moderate incomes who are under-served by conventional housing markets. 
 

Learn more about our Exchange protection software by requesting a few trial evaluation of Double-Take, the leading Exchange replication software for continuous data protection.