At VMworld 2013 I met with Tim Laplante Director, Product Management for Vision Solutions to talk about their new Double-Take Move 7.0 and Double-Take High Availability 7.0 releases. The Double-Take Move product performs system migrations while the Double-Take High Availability product provides high availability and disaster recovery. Both products share the same internal replication engine.
Tim stated that most companies today use multiple hypervisors. An ESG report from Dec 2012 shows that figure to be as high 65%. Tim also stated that while most companies have migrated about 50% of their workload to VMs the remaining 50% are the more business critical workload that really need maximum availability. Tim pointed out that one of the features that really sets Vision’s Double-Take products apart is their anything-to-anything replication capability. Double-Take can work with physical systems and VMs as well as heterogeneous hypervisors and cloud environments. Double-Take’s replication technology can also cross CPU families. For instance, you can use it to migrate workloads from an Intel based server to AMD or from AMD to Intel. It can also cross multiple cloud providers including on-premise private clouds as well as Windows Azure, Amazon and VMware Hybrid Cloud Services. Double-Take 7.0 can be implemented using agents for real-time replication or agentless for near-real time replication.
Some of the new features in the Double-Take 7.0 release include:
- Enhanced Windows Server 2012 support
- Agentless protection for vSphere
- Improved agentless protection for Hyper-V
- P2V protection for Linux
- Linux Logical Volume Manager support
- Double-Take Reporting Service
- Unified protection for the enterprise
The world of heterogeneous hypervisors and cloud environments is here to stay. Vision’s Double-Take enables you to effectively cross cloud and hypervisor boundaries for your migration and disaster recovery scenarios. Some of the customers that have used Double-Take include DELL, HP and IBM. For more information you can check out Vision Solution’s Double-Take 7.0.
