Double-Take® Protects Data Across Virtual Environments
Now Available in Affordable Licensing Package

Southborough, Mass. – February 6, 2006 – Double-Take Software the maker of Double-Take®, today announced the availability and pricing of its Double-Take for Virtual Systems. As customers evolve their IT infrastructure to include greater use of virtualization technologies, it is important they evolve their data protection strategy to leverage and protect this new class of systems. Double-Take for Virtual Systems enables the use of real-time data protection and availability within virtual machines. Additionally, this new offering provides a pricing and licensing scheme that is more in line with customers’ use of virtualization technology in their environment. It could reduce the acquisition costs of data protection for virtual machines by up to 300%, independent of the platform they are currently using.

In the past few years, analysts have indicated that organizations that do not leverage virtual technologies spend as much as 25 percent more on their servers. Double-Take for Virtual Systems allows for the use of lower-cost virtual machines as high availability and disaster recovery targets, making disaster recovery more affordable to those who used to find it cost-prohibitive.

“With Double-Take, customers finally have a stable and flexible solution they can depend on,” said Steve Duplessie, Founder and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “This solution capitalizes on a need for virtualization that is prevalent in the disaster recovery space.”

As the Sawyer School of Management at Suffolk University is moving more towards a global campus, by deploying online learning tools such as Blackboard e-Learning platform, the school realized the need for increased data protection. With a limited budget and IT staff, Suffolk was able to implement Double-Take across its SQL servers, Blackboard applications, and four virtual machines. By using Double-Take, Suffolk saw an almost immediate ROI, saving over $60,000 by using virtual servers.

“With thousands of students and teachers exchanging information constantly, we discovered the need for a reliable and redundant solution to ensure access to courses day or night,” said Dr. Praneeth Machettira, Online Technical Director for Suffolk University Business School. “After evaluating several solutions, we decided on Double-Take. Double-Take has enabled the school to go about business as usual, so if a system outage occurs, it is transparent to our online campus. ”

Double-Take for Virtual Systems allows for simplified management as multiple physical servers can be monitored by and failover to a single server running multiple virtual machines. Using Double-Take, the application data from each server is replicated in real-time to the appropriate virtual machine on the target, helping to reduce hardware costs and increase operational efficiency.

“Customers are always looking for ways to cut costs and make better use of their IT resources. Many have realized that data protection is really all about ‘recoverability’. Existing tape-based solutions are neither reliable enough nor do they meet the RPO and RTO targets that customers have.” said Bob Roudebush, director, solutions engineering, Double-Take Software. “Although virtualization is a new concept for many organizations, it is a natural evolution in IT infrastructure. It allows companies to achieve economies of scale by consolidating many under-utilized servers onto a single physical server running multiple virtual machines. With Double-Take for Virtual Systems, they now have a reliable, scalable and affordable solution for protecting these systems.”

Double-Take for Virtual Systems can be used on several virtualization platforms including VMware ESX Server, VMware GSX Server and Microsoft Virtual Server.

Double-Take Software strongly believes in developing strategic partnerships. By working with companies such as VMware, Double-Take is strengthening its foothold in the disaster recovery market.