Disaster Recovery and Virtualisation: the new challenges
While staying focused on solutions to get key systems up and running again quickly following an incident, Double-Take Software has been filling out it's range of management tools for dynamic infrastructures. Three new software solutions will be introduced this year to meet the evolving needs of data center administrators. The objective is to optimise and simplify the protection of physical and virtual machine workloads to reduce downtime (see the sidebar videos for more). Ideally, recovery is transparent for users.
During his presentation at VMworld Europe Bob Roudebush used a personal analogy to highlight a key feature of the Double-Take approach to disaster recovery. “Every now and then one of my boys asks me “Which of us do you love more, me or my brother?” I always answer the way all parents answer, that I love each of them equally.” He continues “but when we're talking server workloads, it's different. Some systems are more important than others and it's important to take account of that.” It's a question of making the right investments based on business needs, based on a cost/benefit analysis of the potential impact of differing levels of downtime and/or data loss, on an application-by-application basis.
During disaster recovery, the priority is to get the most critical applications up and running again. This is why Double-Take focuses on managing and optimising workload migration in both virtual and physical server environments – and between the two. Double-Take's core competency is high availability, locally and remotely. With Double-Take for ESX, for example, the system administrator can program replication of critical virtual servers every five minutes, or whenever a specified number of modifications has been reached. There's no need for a software installation on each virtual server. Straightforward and much less resource-intensive than SAN replication, Double-Take automatic failover continuously protects the full target system – data, applications and OS. Working at the system and file level, it consumes just 3 to 5% of server resources. On the latest multi-core blade servers the result is close to 100% service availability, whether local or remote. |
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A new Approach for the Data Center
ITRecovery News had the opportunity to sit down with Bob Roudebush for an exclusive interview following his presentation at the VMworld Europe 2009 conference. We asked Bob to fill us in on how he sees Double-Take Software’s market position and what changes we can expect to see over the coming year in their product offerings.
The economic situation is going to impact investments in information systems and architectures, and business recovery will have to work within new constraints. Double-Take Software will be introducing a cost effective solution for SMBs. Not positioned as a competitor for VMware SRM, the Double-Take solution replicates between two SANs and is targeted at larger data centers with significant storage resources.
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What else does Double-Take Software have in store for 2009? Migration tools, optimised workload backups and a new tool to facilitate the management of mixed physical and virtual environments.
Storage vendors see data as so many indistinguishable blocks, where a specialist such as Double-Take optimises the replication of physical and virtual data and application environments. At the VMware Partner University, users can sharpen their knowledge of the latest tools and techniques for Double-Take solutions in VMware environments. And don't miss Bob signing off with a personal greeting to IT Recovery News readers.
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