FalconStor releases next-gen automated disaster recovery software

Computerworld - FalconStor Software today announced the latest version of RecoverTrac software, offering users fully automated recovery of IT services in any data center environment.

FalconStor's RecoverTrac 2.5 software introduces new GUIs that reduce the time it takes to set up data replication to remote sites and speeds up the actual recovery of data in a disaster.

The software now also allows dissimilar hardware and virtual servers to fail over and failback gives users the ability to test disaster recovery without disrupting business operations. Previously, RecoverTrac did not allow virtual machines to recover back to physical ones.

RecoverTrac 2.5 now comes standard with FalconStor's Continuous Data Protector and Network Storage Server software. Those additions allow any data changes to be immediately and automatically replicated offsite to a disaster recovery facility. Because data is continuously replicated, users can recover services in minutes or hours compared to days with earlier iterations, according to Darrell Riddle, senior director of product marketing at FalconStor.

"Recovery works from a single email all the way up to an entire Exchange system," Riddle said. "With this release, customers have the ability to recover many machines at once. Before, for example, if you were recovering a Sharepoint file, made up from multiple systems, you couldn't have machines recover in parallel. It happened in serial. That changes with this."

RecoverTrac 2.5 is integrated with VMware vSphere 5 and Hyper-V and offers support for hardware templates that enables failover and failback between any combination of physical and virtual servers and between dissimilar hardware.

VMware cluster support allows RecoverTrac to perform load balancing between storage servers for high-availability configurations.

The software also comes with an "automated push-button disaster recovery rehearsal" feature that allows IT managers to test and refine recovery processes on a regular basis without disrupting business operations.

"We've tried to make data recovery as simple as possible by reducing the number of steps to install services and get them back up and running, including everything from disasters to upgrading OSes to adding server software patches," Riddle said.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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