Double-Take Puts Disaster Recovery In The Cloud

Continuing the recent trend toward using cloud storage for backup and recovery, Double-Take has introduced Double-Take Cloud. The cloud option gives businesses a recovery alternative to a steep hardware investment in duplicate servers.Double-Take already specialized in backup and disaster recovery, with such products as Double-Take Availability, which replicates changes from primary server to backup server, and Double-Take Backup, which provides continuous backup and hardware-independent restoration. The new product combines the company's backup technology with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud to provide "complete full server protection and rapid recovery for all your servers," according to the announcement.

This "Recovery as a Service" model replicates not only the data but also the applications and system configurations from local servers. If disaster strikes, a business can recover to virtual servers in the cloud, getting up and running without having to wait for repairs to be made on the ground. Furthermore, the restoral to local servers is hardware-independent, which means servers can be recovered to new equipment if necessary or desired.

Double-Take Cloud is part of a recent flurry of cloud-based storage, backup, and disaster recovery solutions. A couple of weeks ago, Cachengo officially launched its Director series, which combine local storage appliances with cloud backup; and Nasuni introduced its approach to turning cloud storage into private storage through caching frequently accessed data locally in a virtual machine.

Double-Take claims that setting up Cloud is "fast and easy: If you are reading about this at breakfast, you can be protected by lunch time." The business does need to set up its own Amazon Web Services account, however, and create its own elastic block store volume -- that step may not be included in the breakfast-to-lunch timeline. The service costs $150/month, with the Amazon subscription extra.