Double-Take Whitepapers
Read white papers on your specific area of interest, including disaster recovery, virtualisation, maximising uptime and more. Read our virtualisation white papers.
Current Whitepapers X2X Server and Storage Migration Solutions Whitepaper
Migrating applications, systems and data has always been a challenge for IT staff; in fact, most have just gotten used to the pain and suffering that comes with migrations. To properly migrate applications and data to new platforms involves risk and takes time to complete, meanwhile users have to stop changing data while it's migrated. The larger the storage footprint, the longer that it's going to take, and migrations routinelytake hours or days to complete. When you think about your disaster recovery plan, does your tape backup system come to mind? Does the mere mention of disaster recovery make you a bit nervous? If so, you're not alone. Many businesses risk grave losses due to failures and disasters yet continue to depend on their tape backups to help them recover successfully should a major outage occur. The thought of implementing a more appropriate disaster recovery plan can be daunting; to the point which many simply push it off until later. Unfortunately 'later' often ends up being after the business has suffered a major loss from which it could not recover. Though server virtualisation technology has changed the IT landscape for the better in many ways, it has also presented several new challenges. One of the chief concerns that IT decision makers face is how to most effectively migrate between disparate server and storage infrastructures without halting production applications or requiring extensive manual intervention. Using a combination of real-time data replication and full-server failover technologies for workload migration can be an effective way to address this challenge.
Building and maintaining computer systems is no easy task and information technology managers are constantly looking for better tools to reduce the total cost of managing their data centres and infrastructure. Advances in computer, networking and storage technology allow us to separate the various parts of our infrastructure to specialised platforms. For example, storage area networks have allowed us to separate the data storage from our servers in much the same way that file servers are used to separate data from desktops and provide more robust management functionality such as centralised backup and recoverability.
Just like major corporations, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are increasingly reliant on the critical data stored on their servers. Limited resources and ulnerability to interruptions put small and midsize businesses at higher risk, and relying on native backup for a small business server can leave gaps in the disaster
recovery plan. While native backup for Windows Small Business Server provides a small measure of protection, periodic tape backup can leave small businesses vulnerable to data and time loss in quantities they cannot afford. The key to getting back on track quickly is a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, including fast access to an up-to-the-minute copy of your data. This whitepaper provides six tips for an SMB approach to protecting critical data. These tips used in conjunction with Double-Take® availability from Double-Take® Software can help SMBs defend against crippling downtime and data loss.
Your entire team's productivity has been increased with BlackBerry handhelds - but what if the server and software that powers these devices goes down?
Though the technological reasons to protect Exchange systems may be self evident, there are quantifiable fiscal reasons to protect them. The dollar value of any given data set may be difficult to calculate, but the cost savings of avoiding even a single Exchange outage can easily be determined. In most organisations, there are at least one or two subsets of end-users who cannot continue to work without these systems. Even if these groups might not regularly produce revenue in the form of direct sales or billable engagements - salaries, benefits and fixed costs still accrue during an outage. Therefore, the loss of the messaging systems for even a few hours could easily result in thousands of dollars in budget outlay without recouping a single dollar in productivity. For revenue-generating groups, the cost of this downtime is more easily quantifiable. Avoiding even one of these outages is not only a good idea for the IT department, but for the CFO's office as well.
Collaboration and compliance issues as the workforce distributed in the 1990s was a serious growing pain on the technology timeline. When web-based collaboration tools came on the scene in the late 90s,online document collaboration became possible. When SharePoint made its debut in 2001,it made online collaboration streamlined, consistent and - amid much fanfare from regulated industry - nearly foolproof. As the global workforce continued to distribute (and as regulated industry continued to tighten up compliance scenarios) collaboration tools and document libraries became an essential part of daily business. Computer virtualisation has come a long way in a very short time, triggered primarily by the rapid rate of customer adoption. Moving resources to virtual platforms have allowed IT departments to consolidate and better utilise computer resources. However, many methods for system protection that were tried and true in the physical world haven't lived up to their expectations when tasked with protecting virtual machines. Many maintain the false belief that protecting virtual machines is as simple as backing up the virtual disk files. This is true - and special care must be taken when performing backup of virtual machines.
Combining the shared OS delivery mechanisms of Double-Take® Flex with the user workspace management technology of RES PowerFuse provides an effective hybrid solution for desktop provisioning and patching. While Double-Take Flex ensures that a consistent and stable read-only image is delivered to any number of computers, RES PowerFuse ensures that the delivered working environment is configured correctly, while user settings are stored and retrieved when needed. By doing this selectively, it is possible to circumvent the caveats of using regular roaming profiles. Besides the ability to use one image for all purposes, the combination of Double-Take Flex with PowerFuse ensures the ability to individualise each and every user workspace, based on who the user is, where the user is, what time it is and a host of other options.
With its ease of use, scalability, reliability and broad industry support, Microsoft® SQL Server® is the solution of choice for many customers. While SQL Server 2008 offers options for improving database protection and recovery, none of them is intended to provide a complete disaster recovery solution. Today, regulatory mandates and service level agreements drive many of these requirements beyond what native SQL Server data protection options can provide. Protecting the data assets stored by SQL is the first step to providing protection and the ability to recover quickly. The second step, commonly overlooked in the initial phases of a recovery plan, is protecting the application itself.
In a survey conducted in 2005 by the Ad Council, most businesses agreed that emergency preparedness is important, yet only 39% said their company had a plan in place. In companies with distributed branch offices, data protection strategies may not have kept up with the reality that branch or remote offices now contain customer databases, email servers and financial information that are critical to the company's day-to-day operation. The traditional approach - relying on tape backup for branch-office data protection - is costly and risky. This white paper examines some of the strategies and technologies available for backing up remote or branch offices.
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