Doubletake Workload Optimization Suite

Bob Roudebush, Director Solutions Engineering for Double-Take and I had an interesting conversation about some of the issues virtual environments can create for organizations that have allowed their virtual infrastructure to grow organically without a plan. Although Double-Take isn't trying to create solutions for all of the potential issues, they are offering one, Workload Optimization suite, that can help organizations optimize their virtual environments.

Here's how Double-Take describes their solution

Data center disasters are every IT manager’s worst nightmare; but that’s only the tip of the iceberg.  Managing today’s complex IT workloads entails more than just data recovery.  Workload management encompasses the hardware, operating systems, applications and data that underpin an organization’s IT backbone — an infrastructure that is more critical than ever for ensuring seamless business operations and, at the same time, is increasingly harder to manage.  In response to these business continuity challenges, Double-Take® Software (NASDAQ:  DBTK) announced a new Workload Optimization suite designed to meet customers’ workload portability, backup and availability needs.  This suite includes four products:  Double-Take® Move, Double-Take® Flex, Double-Take® Back-up and Double-Take® Availability.

• Workload Migration (Double-Take Move):  Move workloads between any combination of physical and virtual hardware (P2P, P2V, V2P or V2V) within datacenters for hardware refreshes, or across locations for datacenter migrations and consolidations.
• Workload Backup (Double-Take Backup):  Continuously backup workloads and recover them on-demand to a new physical or virtual machine.  Using CDP capabilities, recovery can also be done at the item level to any point in time.
• Workload Availability (Double-Take Availability):  Ensure the availability of critical IT workloads for disaster recovery and business continuity using real-time replication and failover that can protect individual applications, entire servers or virtualized workloads running on VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V.
• Workload Flexibility (Double-Take Flex):  Easily manage any workload by booting it from iSCSI SANs, regardless of hardware.

Snapshot analysis

Double-Take has jumped into a hotly contested area in the virtualization technology market for industry standard systems. Suppliers, such as Citrix, Cassatt, Novell PlateSpin, Scalent Systems, Surgient, VMlogix and VMware, are already offering products. In some cases, these suppliers are offering the third generation of their technology.

When asked why Double-Take thought it could take on these folks and win, Bob suggested that Double-Take was starting from a different place and moving forward from there.

Bob pointed out that Double-Take has time-tested technology in the area of replication, that is moving data from here to there quickly, manageably and reliably. Double-Take's current offerings are based upon that "pipeline." Double-Takes current products are focused on using that pipeline to replicate disk, directory and filesystem data. By adding new front end and back end tools, Double-Take can build upon that strong foundation and move/convert other things. It's Double-Take's "pipeline" that is the differntiator.

Although that's an interesting notion, it's not at all clear to me that something layers down in a product can be brought forward as a differentiator.  Many potential customers are looking more at what a product does and is that product going to be cost effective in their own environment than at how the magic is accomplished.

Unasked for shoot-from-the-hip advice

Double-Take it's really important that you find a way to "make it real" for potential customers. The pages of IT history are littered with companies that had better technology, but, in the end, lost out to companies having good-enough technology and better marketing.

I can think of a number of ways you could "make it real" including live demonstrations showing how your product performs better, more reliably and at a better cost point that selected suppliers. These events could be filmed and made available on your website, on youtube.com and other places.

Why not offer a Double-Take bake off kit allowing potential customers a structured way to try out a scale-limited or time-limited version of the product. Test scripts could be included that would highlight Double-Take's strengths.

I have a number of other thoughts, but space here is limited.