Continuity Disaster Recovery Software Gets Private Cloud Advisor

Disaster recovery provider Continuity Software Aug. 16 upgraded its RecoverGuard product to include a Private Cloud Advisor.

RecoverGuard Version 5.2’s Private Cloud Advisor provides full availability and recoverability in the private cloud, or pool of shared data storage.

Private cloud computing is a strategy some companies employ to use secure, in-house IT services via virtualized software, such as VMware’s ESX servers. Private clouds have pros and cons.

While largely effective for consolidating servers—and hence costs—private clouds can be a bear to manage because the abstraction layers generated by virtual machines (VMs) trigger single points of failure, leading to compromises in service availability.

Moreover, attaining high availability in a private cloud is often difficult because it means visualizing, mapping and managing all of the moving components.

The plot thickens as virtual machines are not "storage aware," meaning each VM does not know the infrastructure it sits on.

This leads to configuration drift, something no data center manager wants to deal with when he can be doing something else with his time, Continuity CEO and founder Gil Hecht told eWEEK.

For example, an IT administrator may make a change in one ESX server and make it incorrectly in another ESX server.

As the admin tries to move the VM from one ESX server to another, it could fail or even ruin data because of the drift.

Continuity’s Private Cloud Advisor in RecoverGuard 5.2 makes the cloud aware of the infrastructure the VMs sit on, cutting down on vulnerability risks.

The Private Cloud Advisor in RecoverGuard 5.2 will help IT staff to confirm that the virtual machine software stacks are mapped correctly on physical servers and in storage arrays.

This knowledge helps IT staffers better plan for disaster recovery planning and support service-level agreements set for specific workloads.

Continuity RecoverGuard 5.2 supports storage systems from EMC, IBM, Network Appliance and, as of Aug. 16, HP XP storage systems.

The company’s software also powers Symantec’s Disaster Recovery Advisor product.