Double-Take Availability

A Technology Overview
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Introduction

Well-conceived designs endure. They entrench themselves within the culture of their
respective disciplines and follow an adaptive path toward refinement. Over the course
of twenty years, Vision Solutions has been developing solutions with unmatched
capabilities for ensuring application availability and data integrity.

Double-Take Availability—now in version 6.0—offers exceptional application and data

protection in virtual, cloud and physical computing environments. Thanks to a single,
unified management console, it is easier to use than ever before and requires far fewer
resources than other availability options. Double-Take Availability represents the most
affordable solution for complete data protection.

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Table of Contents:

The Availability Imperative .................................................................................................. 4

Executive Summary ............................................................................................................ 4
A Brief History ..................................................................................................................... 5
Six Reasons why Double-Take Availability Provides Superior High Availability ................. 5
1. Simplicity - Set It and Forget It Data Protection ....................................................... 6
2. Plug and Play Protection - Double-Take’s Pre-configured Universal Virtual
Recovery Appliance ................................................................................................. 6
3. Real-time Replication - Superior Protection Compared to Snapshots ..................... 7
4. Zero Downtime during Migrations ............................................................................ 7
5. Platform Independence ............................................................................................ 8
6. Simplified Management ............................................................................................ 8
The Seventh Reason: Vision’s People ................................................................................. 8
Easy, Affordable. Innovative. Vision Solutions..................................................................... 9

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The Availability Imperative

The pace and competitive landscape of global commerce today dictates the need for
a flexible, resilient and available IT infrastructure that provides 24 x 7 x 365 access to
applications and information. Any interruption or downtime to your data, systems and
applications poses a threat to business operations and can have a major cost impact to
your organization’s bottom line, potentially impacting customers, reputation and revenue.
Achieving the new levels of high availability required to support mission-critical systems puts
increased demands on IT and data center professionals.

Availability for Windows: Over 20 Years of Progress

Vision Solutions has more than two decades of experience in providing availability
and recovery solutions to companies small and large, in a variety of industries
around the world. During the last 20 years, we have learned a great deal about what
is required for us to continually lead the way in providing IT with solutions that enable
business resiliency. Today, we provide the most advanced software-based availability
solutions in the marketplace and Double-Take Availability is our flagship solution for
Windows and Linux.

Now, more than ever, Vision Solutions is committed to leading the way in providing
innovative, affordable and easy-to-use availability solutions that enable IT and data
center professionals to ensure business resiliency for competitive advantage.

Executive Summary
Double-Take Availability for Windows helps protect your profitability and reputation by
providing affordable data protection, fault tolerance and enabling immediate recovery from
any system outage.

The foundation for Double-Take high availability products was laid by NSI software in 1991.
Today, Double-Take Availability is a highly-evolved solution for business resilience, backed
by more than 20 years of experience from Vision Solutions.

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A Brief History
Double-Take Availability

Double-Take Availability—Vision’s flagship availability solution for Windows and Linux

systems—provides affordable application and data protection, fault tolerance and enables
immediate recovery from any server system outage. It also allows you to eliminate non-
productive backup windows. Double-Take
Availability continuously captures changes
and asynchronously replicates those changes
at the byte level in real-time to any storage
system across any distance, locally or globally.
Open-file mirroring and replication capabili-
ties allow you to replicate open files without
taking them offline. Double-Take Availability
also allows you to implement failover clusters
without shared storage or geographic limita-
tions – eliminating the single point of failure
and giving you the freedom to locate cluster
nodes wherever they are most useful. How it Works

Six Reasons Why Double-Take Availability Provides Superior High Availability

Double-Take Availability for Windows helps protect your profitability and reputation by
providing affordable data protection, fault tolerance and enabling immediate recovery from
any system outage.

When evaluating any availability solution for Windows, there are a handful of critical functions
that must be considered. Over the next several pages, we will provide an overview of six
essential availability functions and how Double-Take Availability addresses each.

Six reasons why Double-Take Availability is a superior choice for high availability replication:

Definition: 1. Simplicity - Set It and Forget It data protection includes advanced features that
Virtual Software Appliance automate the initial setup and the ongoing management of your availability environment.

“A virtual software 2. Plug and Play Protection - Double-Take’s pre-configured Universal Virtual Recovery
appliance is a software Appliance for physical and virtual environments gives you a plug and play option for
environment that extending the protection of your virtualized environment.
includes an application
and operating system 3. Real-time Replication - Superior protection compared to snapshots allows you to
that is packaged for a ensure the uninterrupted availability of critical application systems and virtually eliminate
specific virtual platform. the potential for data loss.
Virtual software
appliances are typically 4. Zero Downtime during Migrations - Replication technology allows users to remain
inexpensive and easy to active while Double-Take Availability is recreating the production environment on the
implement.” new system.

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5. Platform Independence - Double Take Availability allows you to protect more of your
environment while spending less money than you would on other options.

6. Simplified Management - A unified console makes it easier to implement, manage

and extract value from a powerful HA environment.

1: Simplicity: “Set It and Forget It” Data Protection

Double-Take Availability automates the setup and configuration of real-time protection and
availability management for business critical applications through advanced application
manager features. These features configure and manage protection for Microsoft Exchange,
SQL Server, Blackberry Enterprise Server, SharePoint Services and Windows File Servers
running on a physical or virtual server, or in the cloud.

Additional automated management features in Double-Take Availability simplify the protec-

tion process by protecting the full server or virtual host. This means administrators do not
need to have an in-depth understanding of the applications running on the server. And
single-screen monitoring gives them the ability to sort, filter and monitor the health of your
servers. They can also check the currency of your target system and view event logs in one
intuitive display.

2: Plug and Play Protection- Double-Take’s Pre-configured Universal Virtual

Recovery Appliance

Plug and play business continuity capabilities for Windows and Linux servers are now
available through the Double-Take Availability Universal Virtual Recovery Appliance. This
appliance provides affordable data protection and migrations enabling simple protection
setup and immediate recovery from any system outage. The Universal Virtual Recovery
Appliance is a pre-configured virtual software appliance that automates the installation and
configuration of protection for physical and virtual servers. Once installed, it auto-provisions
the virtual environment for recovery and then continuously captures data changes and
replicates those changes in real-time to an ESX server at any location, locally or globally.

You can easily install the Universal

Virtual Recovery Appliance by first
downloading it to your target server.
Once it is installed on the target, the
appliance push-installs Double-Take
Availability to the source server to
be protected. The Availability license
code is applied to the source and
the appliance then configures your
protection job. This ability to push
install and configure your protection
jobs makes the protection of critical
servers and data a low-touch activity
for the System Administrator.
Universal Virtual Recovery Appliance’s Choose Volumes to Protect panel

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3: Real-time Replication- Superior Protection Compared to Snapshots

Double-Take Availability is a real-time application and data protection solution that offers
“set-it –and-forget-it features” to ensure optimal configuration on the very first pass. Built-in,
pre-flight checks validate server settings and auto fix capabilities eliminate all the guesswork
so no specialized training is required to be proficient in the use of Double-Take Availability.

The Double-Take Availability Throughput Diagnostics Utility simulates replication traffic and
estimates the amount of bandwidth needed for efficient replication between the production
and backup servers.

Sophisticated monitoring capabilities provide you with instant notification when problems
occur and easy-to-use push button failover and failback features for physical and virtual
machines allow you to switch production workloads from the primary to backup server, and
then back again with minimal preparation. Double-Take Availability can also be configured to
monitor and automatically switch critical applications to a hot backup server if problems are
detected.

Since application awareness is critical to reliable recovery, technology has been built in to
Double-Take Availability to monitor the behavior of key applications and database systems
and automatically take corrective action to ensure the viability of the availability environment.

Double-Take Availability ensures continuous uptime for all of your applications and
databases that reside on Windows and Linux servers including Microsoft Exchange,
SharePoint, BES, SQL, Oracle and others. It also works with all leading virtualization
platforms.

On Windows Server hosts or within Windows-based virtual machines, Double-Take

Availability uses sequential asynchronous replication technology to ensure the integrity of
replicated data, which is especially important in the case of transactional databases such
as Microsoft SQL or Microsoft Exchange. When replicating vSphere VMs, Double-Take
Availability uses VMware APIs for virtual machine snapshot functionality, ensuring that VMs
are in a known and consistent state and ready for recovery at any time.

4: Zero Downtime during Migrations

Manually migrating applications and data to new platforms usually involves some risk. With
lots of interdependencies between layers and compatibility issues they are rarely—if ever—
proceed predictably and painlessly. Double-Take Availability takes the risk out of migrations
because it allows you to avoid many sources of failure by automatically and methodically
reproducing your entire production environment on new hardware. If you are considering
making the move from physical to cloud-based computing, Double-Take Availability can turn
the migration process into a low impact workday task.

Downtime is also a factor that must be dealt with when considering a migration. Depending
on how massive and important the system is, migrations can knock users off the system for
days. Great care must be taken when scheduling migrations so they have the least impact
on productivity and profitability. With Double-Take Availability, users can remain active while
the migration process takes place. No one from IT will ever need to spend an evening,
weekend or holiday in the computer room if users can remain active while the migration
process takes place.

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5: Platform Independence

“The evolution of IT environments are now more complex than ever, with a mix of applications, storage,
Double-Take Availability hardware platforms and operating systems. Since Double-Take Availability is application
brings to bear the and hardware independent, you benefit from the fact that a single solution delivers platform-
knowledge, experience independent Availability and Replication for Physical, Virtual and Cloud servers on Windows
and resources of and Linux.
Vision Solutions, a
world leader Competitive forces have mandated 24/7 availability of some, but not all, of your systems,
in Application and applications and data, making it imperative to separate critical from non-critical systems.
Information Double-Take Availability offers the flexibility to replicate data for key applications only (i.e.
Availability.” SQL Server), versus replicating entire physical or virtual machines.

Double-Take Availability offers protection for public and private cloud deployments. If you’re
running in a private cloud, Double-Take Availability can replicate data to a separate, hot
environment.

For those who are in the business of offering IaaS or SaaS delivered via the cloud, you can
mitigate the risks associated with hosting your client’s critical systems by eliminating the
damage that can result from a server failure. If you are interested in expanding your service
offerings, Double-Take Availability provides you with a reliable and easy-to-manage recovery
platform on which to offer Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS).

6: Simplified Management

A new unified management console in Double-Take Availability 6.0 gives you a single
window into your availability environment. Through this streamlined and unified manage-
ment console, you can quickly learn to harness the power of Double-Take Availability. This
dashboard improves visibility into your physical, virtual and cloud environments with features
that allow you to monitor the health of your protected servers, check event logs and man-
age your license inventory through one screen. It also improves control by allowing users to
edit properties of existing jobs.

The unified management console further simplifies the management of your availability envi-
ronment by forwarding replication statistics and events via SNMP to any enterprise manage-
ment tool that you’re using—even to your email inbox. It also includes a fully functional set
of PowerShell commands so it conforms to growing Windows-based automation standards
initiatives.

The 7th Reason: Vision’s People

At the onset of our involvement in this industry, we pioneered the infrastructure

technologies that were needed to optimize performance and ensure efficient, reliable
replication. We have leveraged our close relationship with Microsoft and the insights
gathered from working with thousands of customers and partners worldwide to continually
enhance our availability offerings. Double-Take Availability—a premier solution for
Windows—scales from SMB to enterprise.

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Vision Solutions is more than just technology. We are the global availability experts, with a
worldwide network of certified partners to help you maximize your availability investment
and a CustomerCare team that delivers around-the-clock, around-the-globe support with
the most advanced and accessible tools—plus a team of veteran industry professionals with
unmatched expertise.

Easy. Affordable. Innovative. Vision Solutions.

With over 25,000 customers globally, Vision Solutions is one of the industry’s largest
providers of business continuity and information availability solutions for Windows, IBM i,
AIX, Linux and Cloud environments. Vision’s MIMIX, Double-Take and iTERA brands keep
business-critical information continuously protected and available. With an emphasis on
affordability and ease-of-use, Vision products and services help customers achieve their IT
protection and recovery goals, which in-turn improves profitability, productivity, regulation
compliance, customer satisfaction and quality of life.

Vision Solutions oversees a global partner network that includes Microsoft, VMware, Dell,
HP, IBM and hundreds of resellers and system integrators. Privately held by Thoma
Bravo, Inc., Vision Solutions is headquartered in Irvine, California with development, support
and sales offices worldwide.

For more information call 1 (800) 957-4511 or visit visionsolutions.com. Also find us on
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or at the Vision Solutions Blog.

Vision Solutions Inc.,

15300 Barranca Parkway,
Irvine, California 92618, © Copyright 2012, Vision Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. IBM, Power Systems, IBM i and DB2 for i are trademarks of
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