Disaster recovery takes to the cloud

Jake Widman
Tuesday, 23 February 2010 12:31

Business IT - Technology

Backup and disaster recovery specialist Double-Take has introduced Double-Take Cloud, which is intended to give businesses a recovery option that doesn't require a steep hardware investment in duplicate servers.

Double-Take's existing products include 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 company's new product combines its backup technology with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) 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, claims Double-Take. 

Furthermore, the restoral to local servers is hardware-independent, which means servers can be recovered to new equipment if necessary or desired.

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."

A business using the service does need to set up its own Amazon Web Services account, however, and create its own elastic block store volum.

Double-Take Cloud service costs US$150/month, with the Amazon subscription extra.