Vision Solutions Supports Migration to New Microsoft Platforms

Vision Solutions, Inc. announced at Microsoft TechEd Europe that the company is working with Microsoft Corp. on providing migration support to customers and service providers.

By working together, the two firms provide organisations with a route to migrate workloads across to new cloud or virtualisation platforms based on Microsoft technologies without downtime during these migrations.

Double-Take Move provides organisations with a data replication engine that can move whole workloads from one platform to another, independent of the underlying virtualisation, server or storage layers.

While data is being replicated, users can continue to access the original application workloads and carry out their work. This approach is different to snapshot-based migration tools that require users to log out during a migration procedure, and that can only migrate workloads between like virtualisation or storage platforms. Once migration of the new target workloads has been completed, users can be redirected to the new systems with near-zero downtime.

"Microsoft has been a strong player in the data centre for many years with Windows Server together with our full management suite System Center. As customers want to be more flexible in terms of hypervisors, databases and clouds, Vision Solutions provides a great solution that helps them to leverage investments they have already made. Moving from VMware to Hyper-V, sharing data from Oracle to SQL Server, moving VMs to Azure: these are typical scenarios in which Vision Solution can help our customers execute on their cloud strategy and achieve a better TCO and ROI, keeping their current investments while taking full advantage of the great innovation that Microsoft is bringing to the market," said Kara Westhusing, Western Europe server and tools division lead.

For companies moving over to cloud platforms based on Hyper-V and Azure, this represents an opportunity to migrate faster and with less business impact.

Ian Masales director Northern Europe, Vision Solutions, commented: "Migration is the hidden challenge for companies moving to the cloud. If the IT team has to undertake additional work or take users offline for hours or even days to make a cloud migration happen, then this represents a significant cost to the business. Similarly, companies have to look at what technical platforms are in place and ensure that their migration strategy and tools makes that move possible, rather than having to stick to existing technology decisions that restrict choice and increase potential costs. Double-Take Move removes these hurdles by letting companies move to the cloud platform that best suits their needs, whether this is a public, private or hybrid approach, and achieve this with almost no downtime."

The latest version of Double-Take 7.0 provides HA, DR and migration capabilities for VMware, Windows Server and Linux as well as KVM, Hyper-V and Xen hypervisor technologies.

Double-Take also integrates with other cloud platforms from companies including Amazon, IBM, Citrix and VMware, providing cloud-to-cloud migration so that companies can avoid lock-in to any particular platform.