Testing conventional disaster recovery mechanisms is kind of like cutting off your hand to find out whether it can be successfully reattached: it’s incredibly painful; if everything works out the way it’s supposed to, you’ll be fine; if the loss is permanent, you are seriously messed up.

To eliminate the horrors of DR and allow you to sleep at night, Continuity Software (one of those companies you haven’t heard of, but should) offers RecoverGuard (one of those products you haven’t heard of, but should).  We’re intrigued by the fact that the new version being announced today, RecoverGuard 4.0, is seemingly unique; no other software vendor has this exact solution. In fact, the company’s toughest competition is the OEM who sells their product.

Here’s their take:

In order to feel complete confidence in your DR solution, you would have to run a full test after every configuration change, which no one can do. RecoverGuard continually monitors for problems and vulnerabilities, validates your DR readiness at all times, alerts you to problems, and tells you what to do about them. Version 4.0 adds capabilities that make it a real business continuity product, not just an “Are we on?” checkpoint:

·         Complete high availability cluster support

·         Automatic detection of configuration drifts affecting disaster recover/high availability servers

·         Root cause analysis that discerns which changes led to the problem and suggests solutions for avoiding the same problem again – and routes that information to the particular person responsible for it

·         Assessment capabilities that find and report on any IT asset  – such as a database you’re linked to – that has no protection at all

CEO Gil Hecht tells GCG that customers can install RecoverGuard 4.0, identify problems, and have them fixed within 48 hours. And he agrees with us that as the use of virtual machines increases, the potential for serious system recovery errors rises exponentially. So maybe it’s possible to get a good night’s sleep again, at least from a DR perspective, giving you valuable time to brood about other problems… the economy… your cheating spouse… etc.