Maker of innovative disaster recovery tool launches U.S. operations
Continuity Software opens Boston and New York offices with a bang: If the company’s application does not help disaster recovery work better, customers will not be charged a dime
A two-year old start-up — Continuity Software — launched its U.S. operations this week with offices in Boston and New York, and it is already making claims which have attracted attention: It says it can help disaster recovery work better, and that it will not charge prospective customers a dime if it cannot help them.
Gil Hecht, CEO of the disaster recovery management (DRM) company, said disaster recovery gets out of sync over time as changes are made, resulting in a 50-75 percent failure rate when tested. He said that the company’s RecoverGuard software does for disaster recovery processes what Onaro does for storage area networks (SANs): Detect problems before they occur and fix them.
Continuity Software allows customers deploy RecoverGuard on as many as 30 servers for 48 hours, after which the company generates a report detailing the topology and navigational model of the data center and DR environment, a description of the risks and threats to the production and DR environments, a list of optimization opportunities, and an SLA analysis.
Bob Laliberte, analyst with the Milford, Massachusetts-based Enterprise Strategy Group, sees the benefit in Continuity’s approach: “Until now, there has simply been no realistic visibility into a full remote recovery operation,” he says. “With all the interdependencies and such limited test capabilities, even the largest companies in the world really don’t know if they will be able to recover from a significant outage.”
Hecht said RecoverGuard understands the relationships and interdependencies between IT infrastructure elements and disaster recovery replication environments to make sure that all production configuration changes are also applied to the remote hot site.
The good thing is that application is not that expensive. An annual license for RecoverGuard is $2,000 per CPU. As best we can tell, Continuity has only one competitor in the market — San Mateo, California-based Illuminator. We will look at the differences between the two companies’ solutions in a future issue. Boston-based Onaro cannot be regarded as a direct competitor because it focuses on storage networks, while Continuity addresses servers, databases, and mainframes.
