New systems give failed servers second chance

Double-Take Software and Dacoll have announced systems that claim to dramatically improve the recovery prospects of failed laptops, desktops and servers.

Double-Take's Server Recovery can restore an entire failed server, including the operating system, applications and data, and even to servers with different hardware configurations.

It combines continuous data replication, Double-Take's heritage, with continuous system state protection and allows recovery from either the real-time image of the system or a snapshot image of the system from a previous point-in-time. It means the product can be used for recovering from unwanted changes such as viruses, corruption and accidental deletions.

There is a specific version of the product, ShadowCaster, for Microsoft's Windows Small Business Server Edition. It continuously sends changes from a production system to a secondary server. If the production server fails or is unavailable, ShadowCaster fails over to the second system.

"Data is the backbone for most organizations, making effective disaster recovery planning a must-have for IT departments. Recovering the data, however, is only half the battle. Without the applications and systems that provide access to the data, true recovery is hard to achieve," a company spokesperson said.

The tens of thousands of Double-Take replication customers might well agree.

For laptops and desktops Dacoll has launched a continuous protection service. It guarantees to provide next day replacement of both hardware and data from lost, inaccessible, damaged or corrupted laptops and desktop PCs. The secret sauce is remote online data backup using Atempo technology.

A LiveBackup software client, installed on each protected system, autonomously handles data collection and transmits it in the background to a central server when a user is connected to any data network.

Users can self-manage simple file restores from the built-in software. If a machine is unrecoverable, say, a virus attack, or lost, stolen or damaged beyond repair then Dacoll will provide a replacement, complete with all data from when the machine last attached to a network, within a service level agreement-defined timeframe.

Dacoll sales manager Ron MacFarlane, said as more users switch to mobile devices, there is a trend to work on documents locally which are often not protected by daily backup procedures.

He said the Prime Secure Service is a neat response to that problem.

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