Double-Take® Software and RES Software Form Strategic Alliance to Dramatically Improve Desktop Provisioning and Management

Posted on February 8, 2010 by amcanty
Southborough, Mass. and Philadelphia, PA – February 8, 2010
 
Double-Take® Software and RES Software Form Strategic Alliance to Dramatically Improve Desktop Provisioning and Management
 
Joint Solution Provides IT Managers with a Desktop Virtualization Solution To Simplify Management and Ensure Ongoing User Productivity and Satisfaction
 
Key Facts:
• IT Managers are increasingly challenged with minimizing the time and money spent on managing their desktop infrastructures. Additionally, they must also ensure each end-user has on-demand access to the data, applications and settings critical to completing their jobs.  
• In the past, addressing these challenges has typically required a compromise between control, management and user personalization. As a result, IT managers are either faced with spending added resources overseeing a more complex environment or end-users experience interruptions in services, impacting the ability of both groups to meet business objectives.
• A new alliance between Double-Take® Software (NASDAQ: DBTK) and RES Software looks to eliminate these headaches by delivering an affordable solution that simplifies desktop management and ensures ongoing user productivity and satisfaction.
• Through the alliance, Double-Take Software has combined its desktop OS streaming technology with RES Software’s unique user workspace management solution. 
• This joint offering allows IT professionals to do the following:
o Maintain a single, shared desktop image which minimizes the time and expense of desktop provisioning and management, while increasing desktop control.
o Centrally-manage and deliver secure, personalized, context-aware desktop experiences to any user.
o Upgrade desktop images from a central source without disrupting the user’s unique workspace environments.
• The solution relies on the Double-Take® Flex OS streaming technology and the RES PowerFuse User Workspace Management solution.
o Double-Take Flex: This offering reduces the time and expense of desktop and server provisioning and management by creating master images which run entirely over the network and can be shared between multiple systems. OS streaming technology allows companies to leverage their existing PC, storage and network infrastructures to create “Flextops” – virtualized desktop PCs with or without local hard disks which run from these centralized images.
o RES PowerFuse: By separating the user workspace from the operating system, RES PowerFuse automates the management, creation and dynamic composition of user workspaces. This is a critical factor in driving user satisfaction and productivity, regardless of delivery platform and an essential component in dynamically adapting the workspace based on users’ device, time, role or location. As a result, IT professionals have the ability to offer context-aware, secure and centrally managed delivery of applications, printing, data and personalized settings to each end-user.
Additional Alliance Details:
• Through this alliance, customers can easily combine Double-Take Flex and its innovative desktop virtualization capabilities with the RES PowerFuse User Workspace Management Software to centrally build, manage and control personalized, secure and context-aware user workspaces.
• Double-Take Flex provides a centralized desktop environment to customers based on OS streaming technology and combines that with advanced user workspace management capabilities from RES Software, solving the industry wide control and management challenges that plague most IT environments. Double-Take Software will resell and provide support for RES PowerFuse User Workspace Management Software to customers as part of the product bundling with Double-Take Flex.
 
Quotes:
Dan Jones, global vice president of sales, Double-Take Software: “Double-Take Software is focused on providing simple, easy-to-manage workload optimization software and delivering innovative and useful solutions that drive cost and complexity out of managing all IT workloads – including desktop workloads. This alliance with RES Software presents customers with an easy way to transition their existing desktops to ‘Flextops’ using Double-Take Flex in combination with some of the dynamic workspace management capabilities of RES PowerFuse.”
 
Jim Kirby, president of the Americas, RES Software: “New system complexities continue to challenge desktop management, creating significant drains on IT resources and impacting user access to the tools needed to complete their jobs, both of which put overall business objectives in jeopardy. Through this alliance, we’re working with Double-Take Software to eliminate these challenges. Our joint solution simplifies both desktop provisioning and user workspace management, reducing the amount of resources needed to oversee these environments and ensuring always-on access for end-users.”
 
Links
• Double-Take Software: www.doubletake.com
• Double-Take Flex: http://bit.ly/8Je1dl
• RES Software: www.ressoftware.com
• RES PowerFuse: http://bit.ly/1a6bJM
For the full article, click here!

Filed under: Double-Take Flex, Press Releases | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Park Community Federal Credit Union – Double-Take Customer Profile

Posted on February 3, 2010 by amcanty

Posted by Dan Kusnetzky @ 3:30 am

“Double-Take Software customer profile

This time, Eric Hubbard, Network Engineer for Park Community Federal Credit Union, and I communicated. His organization has been using Double-Take Software’s product Double-Take Availability. It’s always good to hear from someone actually using a product rather than just hearing marketing messages.

Please introduce your organization and the role you play there.

Park Community is a full service financial provider that exists for it members.  As the Park Community Federal Credit Union network engineer, the responsibility of the entire network sits on my shoulders.  The datacenter, WAN connections, and desktop PC’s are my responsibility to maintain.  With that much responsibility we needed a solution that worked well and was reliable.

 What are you doing that needed this technology?

At Park Community Federal Credit Union, our IT infrastructure included 30-plus virtual servers, including one server that maintained a full terabyte of business-critical data and over 20 million files, all of which needed to be replicated – no small task. With a small IT staff and a tight IT budget, we needed a solution that could protect our SQL and Exchange servers, had the ability to replicate data in real-time and was efficient enough to protect a massive amount of data using the organization’s existing WAN infrastructure.

What products did you consider?

We tried a number of other solutions, none of which were able to replicate without failing. In fact, our previous solution never even made it to the disaster recovery site because it failed in initial testing. We found that the alternatives to Double-Take Availability did not allow for real-time, continuous replication, something that was critical to our needs. Further, the alternatives had trouble with any files larger than 30 gigabytes – with one server housing a terabyte of data, these solutions just did not meet our needs. Double-Take Availability was the only solution out of many tested that not only successfully replicated these servers in real time but also allowed us to protect our entire SQL and Exchange infrastructure.

Why did you select this product?

Quite simply, Double-Take Availability met all of our needs. In fact, we had only planned to use the solution for roughly seven core servers, but Double-Take Availability worked so well – and was so cost effective – that we implemented it across all of our 30-plus virtual servers. The solution allowed us to replicate data in real time on all of our virtual servers, regardless of size. During testing, Double-Take Availability proved that it was able to recover all of our data, including SQL and Exchange, from the production site to our disaster recovery site in less than four hours. Additionally, while moving the disaster recovery server to the disaster recovery site, Double-Take Availability was able to clear the queued replication in just 2 hours.

What tangible benefits have you received through the use of this product?

Cost savings was the biggest benefit that stands out in my mind; our organization was able to implement the disaster recovery solution across…”

For the rest of the article, click here!

Filed under: Double-Take Availability | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Double-Take 101 Series: Retrying Ops

Posted on February 1, 2010 by miketalonnyc

Double-Take Software products are able to handle a lot of different types of situations that can crop up between a production server and a target device.  For example, if connectivity between two servers is temporarily cut and then resumed, the Double-Take Software product line can take appropriate corrective action and resume normal operations without the need for administrative intervention.  That being said, there are some things that we just can’t do automatically, but that can be quickly fixed manually.

A common example of this is when the various management consoles used by Double-Take Software products report that a connection is “Retrying” or “Retrying Ops” with warning or error icons attached.  What’s happening is usually easy to fix, but requires the Administrator taking a few manual steps for the sake of safety.  The manual steps are designed to allow you (the Administrator) to choose which of several valid paths to take to return to full protection.

Retrying occurs when a Double-Take Software product finds that a file we are attempting to write to on a target device is locked.  While the Replication Engine can successfully protect any file (open, locked or otherwise) on a production server, it cannot write to a locked file on a target server.  Since the Engine will maintain I/O write order at all times, being unable to write to a file creates a situation where it has to wait for that file to become free before any other write can be made.  If the file does not get freed up quickly, you will see the error in the management consoles and through other forms of alerting once configured.  You can see exactly which file is being locked by examining the Double-Take logs on the servers in question.  They will detail which file or files are causing the problems.

Correcting the issue is as simple as stopping whatever process is using the file on the target device.  In some cases, it may just be an application running on the target that is actively using the file in question.  In other cases, you may be attempting to replicate system files, but not using the appropriate tools from Double-Take Software.

If an application is running on the target server and doesn’t need to be, shutting the application down will typically correct the problem.  The Replication Engine will be able to make the write, and will move along.  If the application needs to be running, then you may want to exclude those files from replication, as if a service must run on the target, then you most likely do not want that data overwritten by the copy on the production box.

If you are trying to replicate system information (like Windows or Application binaries) then you may not be using the correct Double-Take Availability tools.  System state replication from server to server requires that you use the Full Server Failover Manager.  So, if you’re using the Replication Console alone, or some other wizard, chances are you’ll run into a Retrying error.  The good news is that the Full Server Failover Manager is a component of Double-Take Availability, so you already own everything you need to properly protect the system.  Just stop whatever connection you have in place, run the correct wizard, and you will be all set.

Retying errors can be a trying thing when you’re getting protection configured.  Following these guidelines can correct them quickly, and get you back to a fully-protected state.

Filed under: DT 101, Double-Take Availability | Leave a Comment »

Double-Take® Software Launches Double-Take® Availability for Linux Version 4.6

Posted on February 1, 2010 by amcanty
Southborough, Mass. – February 1, 2010
  
Double-Take® Software Launches Double-Take® Availability for Linux Version 4.6
 
Key Facts:
• Double-Take® Software (NASDAQ: DBTK) is releasing Double-Take® Availability for Linux Version 4.6, which now provides businesses with continuous full-server protection and allows users to protect not only data and applications but also the entire Linux system including operating system and application files.
• This product conducts real-time, full-server replication, which protects OS, application and data files to another server, allowing the user to effectively recover data on demand in the case of a server failure or data loss.
• In addition to full-server replication, Double-Take Availability for Linux Version 4.6 also expands support for Novell® SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) beyond version 10 to include support for versions 9 and 11.
• Double-Take Availability for Linux Version 4.6 is an ideal solution for full-server continuous protection and application availability for Linux users without the expense and complexity of hardware-based replication or proprietary clustering technologies.
 
Product Details and Capabilities:
• Double-Take Availability for Linux Version 4.6 provides customers with full-server capabilities, allowing them to protect their entire source server. It also boasts an added management console wizard to simplify setup of full-server protection.
• With this release, the product now offers network auto-tuning, which is easy to install and configure and allows for easy adaption to many different network configurations automatically, often providing customers with increased performance.
 
Quote:
Shaun Sellers, product manager at Double-Take Software: “Double-Take Software is the only software vendor that is offering customers real-time, full-server replication for Linux. While other solutions replicate at specific times or when an operating system is down, Double-Take Software performs this important task in real time to provide companies with first-class data protection and recovery.”
 
Links
• Double-Take Software: www.doubletake.com
• Double-Take Availability: www.doubletake.com/english/products/double-take-availability
For the full article, click here!

Filed under: Double-Take Availability, Linux | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Get Free Copy of Double-Take Move February 4th

Posted on January 28, 2010 by brennels

Hi Double-Take Software Professionals,

I wanted to inform you if you haven’t heard already that you are invited to recieve a free copy of Double-Take Move for live X2X migrations just by attending the:  

Plan and Manage Your Physical and Virtual Server Migrations on Your Schedule

Date:                February 4th, 2010

Time:               11:00 am ET – 12:00 pm ET

Speaker:          Pete Daher, Director of Enterprise Solutions, Double-Take Software

 **Every Live Attendee Will Receive an Activation Code for a FREE COPY of Double-Take Move.  Don’t Miss This Incredible Opportunity**

How many nights, weekends, and holidays have you lost because you were responsible for consolidating or migrating your servers while everyone else was off work? Let’s cut to the chase: you need an easy-to-use migration solution for your data center that won’t cause you hassles or break the bank.

Introducing Double-Take Move ® From Double-Take Software: A migration product that allows your users to continue to work while Double-Take Move – in real-time – takes care of the data movement. Double-Take Move uses hardware-independent conversion technology that simplifies the movement and consolidation of workloads to enable you to minimize the impact on end user productivity.

During this live webinar, we will cover…

  • An overview of migration functionality and details of various migration scenarios.
  • Data center moves and consolidations, including over-the-WAN migrations. 
  • Features and functionality of Double-Take Move ® From Double-Take Software:
  • o Automated X2X Migrations
  • o Real-time Data Replication
  • o Streamlined Migration Console
  • o Support for Hyper-V and ESX Server
  • o Hardware and Platform Independent
  • o Minimized impact on user productivity

 …and we’ll leave plenty of time to ask questions at the end!

 Register Now! and elimiate those long weekend migration headaches.

Filed under: Double-Take Move, Hyper-V, P2V, Server Consolidation, VMware vSphere, server migration, storage migration, workload migration | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

Double-Take 101 Series: Why Are There Two Forms of Double-Take Backup?

Posted on January 25, 2010 by miketalonnyc

A little over a year ago, Double-Take Software combined several of our product lines into a series of product suites, including Double-Take Availability and Double-Take Backup.  The suites contain everything you need to perform a certain type of operation, so many clients got a bit confused as to why there are two Agent and two Repository versions out there.

The reason is that we have a specialized version of our Agent and Repository software for Double-Take Backup specifically made for Microsoft Exchange Server protection and recovery.  So, if you have an Exchange Server that you want to protect, then you need be sure that the Agent for that server, and the Repository that you use to protect it both have the Exchange-specific Double-Take Backup licensing. 

There is a method to the madness, however.  The Exchange-specific versions of these tools have the ability to backup and recover individual mail items, mailboxes, or entire databases, which the regular versions cannot do.  The non-Exchange versions of the tools can protect anything else at the file level, but cannot get any more granular than that, which most users need for Exchange protection. 

If a Repository is licensed with the Exchange-aware version of Double-Take Backup, it can *also* protect anything else, so you never need more than one copy of Double-Take Backup for each Repository server.  The Exchange-aware Agent can also protect any other data and system state information on an Exchange Server, so you also never need more than one Agent for each protected production machine.

Rules of thumb?  If any server protected by a Repository is running Exchange, you use one Exchange-aware license of the Repository software.  If the production server is running Exchange, you need one Exchange-aware version of the Agent software.  For all other systems, use the regular Agent and Repository versions.

Got more questions? Reach out to one of our partners, or visit http://www.doubletake.com to find a local Sales Team that can make sure you have the right tools for the job.

Filed under: DT 101, Double-Take Backup, Exchange | Leave a Comment »

When It Comes to Server Migration, You Can Learn a Lot From a Twit

Posted on January 21, 2010 by amcanty

By Brace Rennels
TechNewsWorld
01/18/10 6:00 AM PT

“Twitter isn’t just for meaningless banter and celeb gossip. It can be a wealth of professional insight if you know how to use it right. IT pros, for instance, can pick up a lot of tips about server migration by polling their fellow twitterers, aka “twits.” Also, hearing what they have to say about about their own mistakes can teach you a lot about what NOT to do.

OK folks, Twitter may be a fad, but it is also a wealth of information into real people’s problems, and I don’t think it is going away anytime soon.

In fact Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) announced recently that they are going to begin crawling tweets, and they will appear in search queries. So yes, I am a fellow “twit,” and proudly so, because I know how to use it to find the information that I am looking for and can then chat with fellow twitterers about issues.

Here are the top five server migration mistakes that I’ve seen tweeted:

1. Server Downtime

Server downtime is probably the most-heard concern when performing a migration. This is because most migration processes require the source server be offline, either during the conversion process or during the recovery. If the solution doesn’t require the server to be offline, then they won’t tell you they require the application to be offline and not accessible to the users, which is no different then having the server down.

High availability solutions have now addressed this issue through real-time replication that can transfer the data to the new platform while the server and application remain online and available to users and then failover with minimal interruption. This process has been used for over 15 years now to minimize downtime for business-critical systems for disaster recovery, so why not use it for a server and hardware migrations?

2. Late Night and Weekends

Get your weekends back. One of the greatest myths about server migrations is that they need to be performed during off-hours when no one is using the servers or server data that is being migrated. This is usually because the server migration can’t capture changes to the data after the migration starts.

This is typical of most physical-to-virtual conversion processes; once the virtual migration starts, none of the data can be accessed, and if the servers is online and available, a differential restoration is required to capture the changes that did occur.

This isn’t the case with asynchronous replication migration products, where data can change on the older server and replicate to the migration target server in real time. Because of real-time replication, migrations can be performed during normal business hours and then failed over to the target server once all the data changes have been captured and transferred to the new system.

3. P2V Conversion Process Failed

There is a reason why it was free. Actually there are two: first, either it is beta and doesn’t work and the company is looking for feedback; or second, it works great and they want to capture market share.

I have seen too many tweets from people complaining about the pain of the P2V (physical to virtual) process or virtual server migration they are going through, but they can’t be bothered to spend a couple hundred dollars for a product that works and can make the nightmare go away.

I can’t say I have much sympathy for those who try to perform critical functions with free tools that promise the world, but I have to admire the ambition — not intelligent, but you have to respect the tenacity.”

 For the last two server migration mistakes, click here!

Filed under: Best Practices, Support | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Plan and Manage Your Physical and Virtual Server Migrations on Your Schedule

Posted on January 20, 2010 by amcanty

Introducing Double-Take Move ® From Double-Take Software: A migration product that allows your users to continue to work while Double-Take Move – in real-time – takes care of the data movement. Double-Take Move uses hardware-independent conversion technology that simplifies the movement and consolidation of workloads to enable you to minimize the impact on end user productivity.

During this live webinar, we will cover…

  • An overview of migration functionality and details of various migration scenarios.
  • Data center moves and consolidations, including over-the-WAN migrations. 
  • Features and functionality of Double-Take Move ® From Double-Take Software:

                                  - Automated X2X Migrations
                                  – Real-time Data Replication
                                  – Streamlined Migration Console
                                  – Support for Hyper-V and ESX Server
                                  – Hardware and Platform Independent
                                  – Minimized impact on user productivity

**Every Live Attendee Will Receive an Activation Code for a FREE COPY of Double-Take Move.  Don’t Miss This Incredible Opportunity**

REGISTER NOW! http://bit.ly/4JiCxY

Filed under: Workload Optimization | Leave a Comment »

Double-Take 101 Series: FFO for SQL Servers? How about File or Blackberry or SharePoint?

Posted on January 18, 2010 by miketalonnyc

In a recent DT:101 posting, I went over how you can use Full Server Fail Over (FSFO) technology to safely protect Microsoft Exchange Servers, even though this isn’t our best practice here at Double-Take Software.  This prompted quite a few questions about the other applications that are covered using our Application Failover Manager (usually called DTAM) technology.  Both types of failover are included in Double-Take Availability, and are both fully supported by Double-Take Software for just about anything running on a Windows Server platform. So, here’s a brief run-down of where our best practices lie for the applications that DTAM technology supports:

SQL Server: We recommend DTAM technology for SQL Servers that are running Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and up, and that are not running other software on the same machine.  Where 3rd-Party SQL-specific tools (like a database front-end system) are running on the same server as SQL, then Full Server Fail Over (FSFO) technologies are a better bet. 

Best Practice Recommendation: DTAM (Application Failover Manager)

File Servers: DTAM is the preferred solution if the file servers are not running additional application on the same device.  However, if there are many applications running on the server, or if the primary function of the server is to run as a Print Queue server, then FSFO is an easier solution to use. 

Best Practice Recommendation: DTAM (Application Failover Manager)

Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES): FSFO offers some compelling features for a single-instance system such as BES.  The SRP security identifier can only be in-use on one server at a time, and therefore having it installed on the target device can lead to accidental license violations.  This causes RIM to lock both devices out of the network, bringing your mobile workforce to a screeching halt.  DTAM solutions are available for BES, but are typically used to assist in providing high availability paired with off-site disaster recovery.

Best Practice Recommendation: Full Server Fail Over

SharePoint Services: Single-server SharePoint should leverage FSFO technology to allow for changes to configurations and other system-level changes to be replicated automatically to a target device.  However, to provide both local high availability and remote disaster recovery, you will use both FSFO and DTAM, so we make sure SharePoint is one of our DTAM wizards.

Best Practice Recommendation: Full Server Fail Over

Always remember that you can choose either form of failover technology (DTAM vs. FSFO) for any server in your environment.  These best practices simply offer guidance on what we’ve seen work best across the majority of our clients.  When in doubt, give Technical Support a ring (http://www.doubletake.com/support) and run the solution by them for further guidance.

Filed under: Best Practices, DT 101, Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Workload Availability | Leave a Comment »

VMware ESX4 Update 1 Supports Double-Take VRA Functionality

Posted on January 15, 2010 by brennels

This is a follow up post to the VMware ESX4 throws Double-Take VRA a curveball post I wrote back in October. I just recieved an e-mail notifications from one of our most senior engineers prompted by a usergroup member request that the VMware ESX4 Update 1 added back the “Hot Add” feature which provides the ability to add disks to a VM on the fly. This is great news and effort by VMware to realize the importants of this feature and the thousands of users that it impacted. I don’t believe this requires users to upgrade to the advanced version so the same functionality should be available in the ESX4 standard edition.

Here is a link to the release notes of ESX 4.0 Update 1. I don’t see the enhancement listed so it must have been rolled up into the list of issue resolutions that were included.

Hopefully this will be good news to most of you handcuffed by this situation and a special thanks to our partner VMware for working on resolving this functionality.

Filed under: Double-Take Availability, Double-Take Move, VMware vSphere, workload migration | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Next Page »