Copy and protect

Double-Take Software has opened its first office in the Middle East as it looks to grab a share of the data recovery market.

Infrastructure software company Double-Take recently opened its first office in the region after a nine year presence in the market through its re-seller and distributor channel.

"We felt it was high time that we established a physical presence in the Middle East after operating from Europe so long. Having an office here is very important in terms of adding value to the product as users here especially like face to face contact," said Hafida Rahmi, sales manager, Middle East and Africa at Double-Take Software.

The company currently employs a staff of three in the region, and has immediate plans to expand by adding two more staff members. It is also on the look-out for systems engineers with some pre-sales experience.

Double-Take specialises in the provision of software products for high availability and data recovery, including continuous data replication, application availability as well as system state protection.

Its offerings are designed to enable users to protect and recover business-critical data and applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL and SharePoint, in both physical and virtual environments.

"Our product is really simple in that you install the software on your existing hardware architecture first. So you don't need anything more than the software itself. It's plug-and-play and it does an initial mirroring of the entire system and not only the data like many of our competitors," explained Rahmi.

According to Rahmi, Double-Take's software does a mirroring of the data together with the operating system and the applications. This is considered as the initial mirroring from source machine to  target machine, conducted on the local area network or wide area network.

According to Rahmi, this ensures that replication takes place at the byte level and is not volume or snapshot based. "That is why the replication is very quick because it captures the IOs (ins and outs) at the kernel level of the operating system and replicates them very quickly," Rahmi said.

Double-Take touts its affordability and easy installation as major advantages of the product. "No other product has the ability to replicate the system state as well as the data at the same time in the same solution. It's called full server failover," Rahmi said.

Rahmi went on to explain that the replication enables enterprises to save on application and operating system cost at the target level. "For example, if you are a bank with 200 source machines and need to replicate to 200 target machines, at target level you do not need to buy 200 application and OS licences. This is a considerable saving," she said.

"Double-Take aims to offer enterprises data continuation and to protect site failure for disaster recovery. Our objective is to have zero downtime and zero data loss and always have application, data and operating systems continue to function successfully," said Rahmi.

Rahmi and her team will concentrate on a number of verticals across the region including oil and gas, telecoms and banking and finance institutions. Rahmi believes the Middle East's IT professionals are ahead of their counterparts in traditional markets in terms of their willingness to embrace new technologies and solutions. It is that enthusiasm for taking on innovative products that Rahmi believes has seen Double-Take gain traction.

"We strongly believe in this region and over the next year our key objective is to encourage growth. When we had no direct presence in the region we found that we were growing at 25% to 30% in terms of sales. Now that we are based here, we are looking at a conservative growth of 40% year over year," said Rahmi.

Double-Take plans to fuel this growth with a number of initiatives including advertising.marketing and assisting its re-sellers in the region.