Double-Take's Backup isn't

Double-Take is going to show its Backup and Availability products at Storage Expo in the UK next week - but be warned Backup is not back-up, it's replication.

The idea Double-Take has is to rebrand its server replication software as Backup when it's used to send branch or remote office (ROBO) data to a central office for disaster recovery (DR) or business continuity purposes. We first wrote about this in April, saying it was a combination of two software products: acquired TimeSpring's TimeData point-in-time recovery; and Livewire continuous data protection (CDP). This gives us CDP of server software, from O/S to app images and data.

If the ROBO server crashes the continusly replicated copy of its software state can be rebuilt to any point in time on either the repaired original server, another physical or a virtual server (ESX or Hyper-V). You can recover the entire server image or a piece of it, down to an individual e-mail. The ROBO staff does not have be IT-skilled enough to manage all this, according to Double-Take. Think of it as fine-grained ROBO server replication.

Double-Take Availability is the rebranded Double-Take for Windows which can restore a crashed server in five to ten minutes. Double-Take says it has "new application-aware monitoring capabilities, enhances protection of Microsoft SQL environments and introduces a new way of re-synchronising protected data," which leads to faster re-synch times.

It supports ESX v4, Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V release 2, plus apps such as Exchange, SharePoint and SQL. There is app-aware monitoring of these with "Are you alive?" tests. If the result is "No" then failover or other corrective action can be initiatated using policies set by admin staff.This capability can be extended to other apps apparently.

The product also "automates the configuration and management of SQL cluster protection to a non-clustered system at the DR (disaster recovery) site".

Both products look like they'll do a good job for their small-medium enterprise (SME) customers.

Neither product is yet available, announcement being scheduled for launch later this month, and pricing information will have to wait until then as well. ®