New features include physical and virtual On Demand Migration and ease of Microsoft SharePoint Services Protection

Double-Take Software (NASDAQ: DBTK) today announced Double-Take 5.0, an innovative platform upgrade to its industry leading replication and recovery products. Double-Take 5.0 is the only disaster recovery product to combine continuous data replication and full server protection: a combination that eliminates the need to install and maintain applications, patches and configurations on the standby server for disaster recovery. Furthermore, the new Full-Server Failover feature allows customers to use Double-Take for quick and painless migrations between different types of server hardware or virtual machines.

"With enterprises migrating data to virtual environments where more data is on fewer servers, it becomes even more crucial for enterprises to protect these valuable assets and applications from outside attacks, internal glitches and disasters," said Noemi Greyzdorf, research manager at International Data Corp. (IDC). “Double-Take Software’s new offering with Double-Take 5.0 only continues to advance itself in this market.”

Automated Full-Server Failover

One of the product’s new features, Full-Server Failover, drastically reduces the complexity of setting up a standby system for failover and reduces the burden on IT administrators to continually maintain that system as changes and updates are made to the production server. The feature can be used to streamline protection for any application running on a Microsoft Windows server and does not require pre-installation or configuration of any application software on the standby server. In addition, the Full-Server Failover feature can be used to protect critical servers in local (LAN) and remote (WAN) environments, and supports both 32 and 64-bit operating systems. More importantly, this full-server protection is hardware independent - the standby system does not need to be the same make, model or configuration and can even be virtualized to reduce the cost and complexity of disaster recovery.

“We have peace of mind knowing that not only is our data protected, but our operating system and applications are protected as well,” said Jeff Reynolds, MIS manager, Alaska Tanker. “In the event of an outage, our business can be up and running in a matter of minutes without data loss or disruption to our normal workflow.”

“Every organization knows they should protect their business-critical systems from unwanted downtime. The challenge to-date has been that implementing protection has come at the cost of needing to configure and maintain their disaster recovery environment. This ‘protection tax’ requires that they keep their disaster recovery servers’ operating systems, applications and configuration in lock-step with their production environment which can be a costly effort,” said Bob Roudebush, director of solutions engineering for Double-Take Software. “With Double-Take 5.0 and features like Full-Server Failover, we’re repealing the ‘protection tax’ for our customers and providing them the ability to protect or migrate entire servers easily all while the production workload remains available. This allows them to devote their time and resources to more worthwhile efforts while still remaining protected in the event of a disaster.”