Double-Take takes to the clouds

Double-Take software has become the latest company to exploit cloud computing.
The company, which specialises in disaster recovery and backup software is looking to offer customers the option of a public cloud service.

The company has chosen Amazon Web Services to offer a service that enables servers to be back up to the cloud. Double-Take Cloud uses the company's existing replication engine, but within a cloud environment. This allows customers to recover their data and operating systems, and resuming working with a minimum disruption to service.

Peter Laudenslager, senior director of Double Take's Cloud Recovery division said that the software would enable users to connect direct with the cloud and only pay for the capacity that is actually being used, making it an extremely cost-effective option. He said that the company had tied up with Amazon because it was the leading player in the public cloud - and he said that it had to be a public cloud to deal with the elastic demands. "We were looking for a supplier that had compute elements and not just storage, there's only one player that could do that and that was Amazon."

He said that the fact that Amazon was based on Xen was irrelevant for customers who might have VMware or Hyper-V. "We don't care what software is being used, we don't care what hardware people have and we don't care whether we're talking about physical or virtual environments, we'll work with all of them," he added.

Double-Take Cloud is priced at $150 per server per month, with the Amazon component costing about $100 a month, while storage is about 20 to 25c per Gigabyte a month. Laudenslager said there will be more detailed European pricing coming later in the year.