Vision Solutions offers Recovery as a Service platform
Vision Soutions, a supplier of backup, archival storage, and disaster recovery software, just launched a kit allowing the creation of "Recovery as a Service" offerings. The company's Double-Take and MIMIX have become well regarded ways to back up, recover, and replicate data in physical, virtual, and cloud computing environments.
What the company announced
Here's how the company describes the components of its recent announcement:
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.
Snapshot analysis
Vision Solutions is a company I've tracked for quite some time. When I first became aware of the company, it largely focused on providing clustering, availability and disaster recovery products for IBM's OS/400 (now known as IBM i) and IBM's AIX (now known as IBM AIX). It was just thinking about offering similar technology for Windows and Linux. At that time, Vision Solutions' technology was just about the only game in town for OS/400 users.
When asked, these customers typically raved about the quality and performance of Vision Solutions' products.
Today, Vision's product set has been extended to offer cross-platform data sharing (Double-Take Share is the product name), X86 Intel/AMD platform migrations (Double-Take Move is the product name), and migrations for IBM Power Systems (MIMIX® Move and Double-Take RecoverNow for AIX are the product names.)
The issue Vision faces is that quite a number of competitors are targeting backup; archival storage; data replication and migration; and disaster recovery. Although the products are excellent, does the company have the strength to out-muscle companies from A (Amazon) to Z (Zetta) that also offer competitive products. All of the big suppliers, including HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Symantec have offerings in this category, too.