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Citrix debuts disaster recovery app

Citrix has developed disaster recovery software that uses Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization technology to help automate and speed the recovery process.

Citrix has released version 5.5 of its Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V, a suite of tools for managing virtual containers created with the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization software.

The chief addition to the latest version of this package is a new program called Citrix StorageLink Site Recovery. StorageLink offers a single console for creating secondary off-site instances of virtualized operating environments. It also offers tools to test the failover process.

Although the market for disaster recovery software is mature, Citrix is marketing StorageLink on the premise that it is easier to use, thanks to its integration with Hyper-V. Hyper-V provides a common platform across primary and backup sites, upon which virtualized operating environments can be set up and moved around with relative ease.

"The traditional solutions available today are either complex, operationally intensive or very expensive," said Biki Malik, who is a senior director of product management at Citrix. The advantage of StorageLink, he asserted, is that the administrator can handle multiple aspects of the disaster recovery process, such as site designations or storage replication, through a single interface.

StorageLink can be run either from Citrix's own Essentials console or through Microsoft Systems Center. Citrix also offers a software development kit to access the features from other programs, by way of Web services.

In a typical usage scenario, an organization would virtualize all the operating environments it would need to keep running during a time of disaster. The virtualized instances would serve as the master copies, which then could be designated by the administrator to run from a secondary site, by using StorageLink. Both sites, which could be separated by an IP (Internet Protocol) network or a local area network, would require servers running Microsoft Windows Server with Hyper-V enabled.