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Tag: backup-software

  • Double-Take Announces Workload Optimization Products


    Double-Take Software is building on its current data protection repertoire by taking on the challenge of workload optimization, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    Workload management encompasses the hardware, the operating systems, applications and data that underpin an organization’s IT-backbone.

    Southborough, Massachusetts-headquartered Double-Take has designed a workload optimization suite to cater to workload portability, backup and availability needs.

    Dean Goodermote, CEO at Double-Take Software, said the move was to align the business to best meet its customers’ evolving technology needs.

    Dean Goodermote, CEO at Double-Take Software

    "Our new Workload Optimisation suite exemplifies Double-Take Software’s focus on providing highly functional, non-intrusive software to an overloaded IT department looking to reduce costs," he said.

    "It represents our affordable approach to meeting customers’ migration, availability, backup and recovery needs."

    There are four products that make up the new suite:

    • Double-Take Move – as the name suggests, moves workloads between physical and virtual hardware within data centers for hardware refreshes. It can also move data across locations for data center migrations and consolidations
    • Double-Take Flex – is for managing workloads by booting from iSCSI SANs running on any kind of hardware
    • Double-Take Backup – backs up workloads continuously and recovers them on demand to new physical or virtual machines using CDP capabilities
    • Double-Take Availability – makes sure that critical IT workloads are available when disaster strikes for recovery and business continuity. It allows real time replication and failover for protection of individual applications, entire servers or virtualized workloads that run on VMWare ESX or Microsoft Hyper V

    Goodermote said all other Double-Take flagship products are built around the new workload optimization suite with new functionalities and licensing options.

    He said users can now migrate, backup, protect and flexibly operate physical and virtual workloads across the enterprise whatever the Operating system, hardware or location.

  • Hitachi GST Takes Another Shot At Consumer Storage Market

















    Hitachi GST is making a fresh attempt at entering the consumer storage market after its first abortive attempt in 2007, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    Brenden Collins, Hitachi’s vice president of product marketing, dismisses the earlier attempt as one that "didn’t take off that well".

    The latest move follows in the wake of Hitachi GST’s decision to acquire Fabrik Inc, which makes G-Technology external hard drive systems for Macintosh computers and SimpleTech systems for PCs.

    While the financial terms of the acquisition haven’t been revealed, the Fabrik deal has been announced.

    It is interesting to note that hard drive competitors Seagate Technology LLC and Western Digital Corp. and several other storage players including EMC Corp, seem to find the acquisition route an ideal means of entering the consumer storage product market.

    Fabrik has renamed its Mozy product as Fabrik Ultimate Backup and has sold its option with SimpleTech systems.

    The newly named product continues to provide its users with the 2GB free space and has retained the charge at $4.95 per month for unlimited online backups.

    The company has also entered into a partnership with ArcSoft Inc for local backup software, so competing with EMC’s Iomega and Retrospect.

    The drag-drop-store in Apple Mac or external devices feature for G-Technology has also been enabled.

    Hitachi GST plans to run Fabrik as a standalone business and will allow all its partnerships continue even where the Fabrik partners compete with Hitachi’s external disk storage partners.

    Brian Babineau, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, told Search Storage that such partnerships and relationships are becoming commonplace in the storage industry.

    "There’s a new class of products emerging," he said. "You’re starting to see a blend of enterprise functionality, simplified and masked, as well as redundancy built in.

    What’s interesting about these deals is to see how the simplified consumer solutions can then move upmarket."

    Wolfgang Schlichting, IDC’s Research Director is concerned that Hitachi should not upset its traditional client base in the process of acquiring Fabrik.

    "Hitachi is one of the last remaining hard drive manufacturers without its own branded external solution.

    "They have to be careful not to upset their traditional client base, but that’s also the case with the other hard drive manufacturers."