Double-Take Teams With Amazon For Cloud Recovery
The company's new Double-Take Cloud disaster recovery offering lets customers quickly recover operations to the cloud in case of a disaster at their production site, said Peter Laudenslager, senior manager for the cloud recovery program at Southborough, Mass.-based Double-Take.
It is aimed at customers who either do not have access to a remote disaster recovery site, or whose remote site is already maxed out in terms of power or other resources, Laudenslager said.
Double-Take Cloud is based on the company's data protection software, which includes such storage services as replication and rapid recovery, and adds Amazon EC2 on the back end, Laudenslager said.
"So now, for a few hundred dollars in upfront costs and an hour of configuration, any customer can have the ability to push a button so when a server fails, it can be recovered immediately," he said.
The new solution allows a customer's operations to recover to the Amazon EC2 cloud from where it can be run in an emergency until operation falls back to the customer's site.
"So if a server blows up, and can't be rebooted, the customer can go online, get their cloud-based servers running, and then start the recovery of the local servers," he said.
Double-Take offers real-time protection, so customers can recover data up to a few seconds or minutes old, Laudenslager said. "And our solution recovers the system," he said. "Most don't. So if the accounting department has a new Microsoft Windows patch, and its server goes down, it can recover the server with the most recent patch."
Double-Take Cloud costs $150 per month, per server, Laudenslager said. For customers who prefer to treat it as a capital expense instead of an operating expense, the software is also available for purchase for $1,295 per server, with a 20 percent yearly maintenance cost.
In addition, customers need an Amazon EC2 account for which they will pay about $100 per month, or 13 cents per hour, for an image repository which can support between 10 and 20 production servers. They will also have to pay about 20 cents, per GB, per month of storage and related bandwidth costs, he said.
Double-Take's solution providers can either sell the software and help customers connect to Amazon EC2, or they can take advantage of an affiliate program the vendor is currently developing, Laudenslager said.
"It should be neutral to the partner," he said. "If they sell it, they get a quick hit. If they offer it as a service, they get revenue on a monthly basis."