Startup Makes Disaster Recovery Work

Continuity Software claims it can help disaster recovery work better — and the company won’t charge prospective customers a dime if it can’t help them.

The Israel-based disaster recovery management (DRM) company announced its move into the U.S. market this week, opening its U.S headquarters in Boston and a sales office in New York.

CEO Gil Hecht, whose previous venture was a database virtualization company called Savantis, said disaster recovery gets out of sync over time as changes are made, resulting in a 50-75 percent failure rate when tested.

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 lets prospective 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.

Hecht says the company has yet to find an environment it can’t find problems in.

“Given the choice between inevitable data loss if faced with a disaster versus the implementation of a non-intrusive, scalable, easy-to-deploy, and cost-effective disaster recovery management solution, the decision is easy,” he said.

“Until now, there has simply been no realistic visibility into a full remote recovery operation,” said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Bob Laliberte. “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.”

An annual license for RecoverGuard is $2,000 per CPU. While Onaro focuses on storage networks, Continuity Software addresses servers, databases and mainframes, finding replication infrastructure gaps and configuration vulnerabilities. The company has one competitor — Illuminator — but claims to be more advanced.

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.

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