Vision Solutions brings protection and recovery to the cloud

The new solution, based on the company's trusted Double-Take and MIMIX products, enables cloud service providers to accelerate their cloud businesses by offering their customers Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS), while taking advantage of the simplicity of pay-per-use pricing. Vision's CP&R offering also allows IT professionals an affordable, low-risk path to the cloud.

The new cloud offering positions Vision Solutions as a premier provider of Cloud Protection & Recovery, High Availability/Disaster Recovery and Migration/Cross-Platform Data Sharing solutions that enable businesses of all sizes, from SMB to enterprise, to affordably and efficiently protect their data, applications and servers.

According to Gartner, "The key attributes of cloud computing — service-based, scalable and elastic, shared, metered by use and Internet-based — deliver a strong alternative to more inflexible and expensive traditional disaster recovery services and may even be a superior alternative to an in-house self-managed approach. As a result, Gartner expects RaaS to continue to grow as a logical extension to cloud infrastructure services." It estimates that "worldwide recovery as a service (RaaS) spending in 2012 was $465.7m, and that the market will grow to $1.2bn by 2017, a CAGR of 21%."

Vision Solutions' new Cloud Protection & Recovery offering includes:
• Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) Platform - Double-Take Cloud Protection & Recovery (CP&R), Apache CloudStack Edition enables cloud providers running Citrix CloudPlatform or Apache CloudStack to offer cloud-integrated Recovery-as-a-Service to their end customers. This product is built on Double-Take's real-time replication technology.
• Metered Usage - Double-Take and MIMIX Metered Usage allow cloud providers to consume licenses of Vision Solutions' Disaster Recovery, Migration and High Availability solutions in a pay-as-you-go fashion. This offering reduces business risks for cloud providers and helps create affordable cloud-based DR, HA and Migration solutions for the end-user.
• Software Development Kit (SDK) - Double-Take SDK offers cloud providers the ability to use APIs for custom integration of Double-Take into their cloud ecosystem. This enables a higher degree of automation and helps reduce administrative costs for cloud providers.

With the launch of its cloud offering, Vision Solutions is also realigning its product portfolio into three solution categories: Cloud Protection & Recovery; High Availability and Disaster Recovery; and Migration and Cross-Platform Data Sharing.

Vision's High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions have set the industry standard for 22 years, ensuring resilience across cloud, virtual and physical environments. Products include:
• Private/Public Cloud Protection - vCloud Director Aware Data Protection
• Server Protection (Cloud, Virtual, Physical) - Double-Take Availability for Windows & Linux, MIMIX Availability and iTERATM Availability for IBM i and Double-Take RecoverNow for AIX
• Agentless VM Protection - Double-Take Availability for Hyper-V and Double-Take Availability for vSphere

Vision's Migration and Cross-Platform Data Sharing offering provides the products and services needed to eliminate the strain on IT resources while offsetting the risks associated with migrating complex, multi-tiered computing environments with near-zero downtime. Products include:
• Cross-Platform Data Sharing - Double-Take Share
• Intel/AMD Migrations - Double-Take Move
• Power Systems Migrations - MIMIX Move and Double-Take RecoverNow for AIX

Alan Arnold, chief technology officer, Vision Solutions,"Companies of all sizes, from SMB to enterprise, are considering cloud-based recovery as a non-disruptive path to cloud adoption and it follows the scalable, comprehensive disaster recovery and availability solution that every cloud option requires. We are excited to introduce our Cloud Protection & Recovery offering with a goal of enabling cloud providers a new path to revenue and their customers the industry's most reliable data protection solution."

Peder Ulander, vice president of product marketing, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix, "Citrix CloudPlatform lays a foundation on which datacenter operators can quickly and easily build on-demand, elastic cloud services within their existing infrastructure. The Vision Solutions' Cloud Protection & Recovery offering allows CloudPlatform customers to take full advantage of cloud computing, with the added benefit of enhanced protection for data, applications and servers."

Jay Bharvada, managing director, perTECHtual, "As the market for solid cloud offerings continues to expand, we're thrilled to be able to fulfill the need for a scalable and feature-rich RaaS solution to our customers with Vision Solutions' CP&R. Vision Solutions and Double-Take are brands which our customers trust, with a strong reputation built over 20 years, for providing reliable continuous server protection and on-demand restoration. The security, reliability, and resilience provided by the Cloud is something both small and enterprise businesses cannot afford to ignore. At perTECHtual, we are all about providing true resilience, in every aspect of our clients' business. For our customers, this is a great and affordable opportunity to gain access to the best disaster recovery solutions and private secure enterprise clouds."