Continuity Software Expands Service Availability Risk Management Portfolio with AvailabilityGuard/SAN

NEW YORK, August 26, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

- New Software Solution Detects Downtime and Data Loss Risks across Entire Storage Area Network (SAN) - Ensures Consistent Compliance with Service Availability Goals

Continuity Software™ today announced it has expanded its award-winning family of service availability risk management solutions with the addition of AvailabilityGuard/SAN™.  The new software solution detects downtime and data loss risks across the entire Storage Area Network (SAN), further ensuring that data protection and business continuity goals are consistently met.  

The modern SAN has become very complex, made up of numerous vendors' technologies and managed by multiple teams. Keeping up with hundreds of instruction pages published regularly by each storage, server, HBA, multipathing, virtualization, and other vendors at all times is essentially impossible for any IT team. Configuration errors that violate vendor best practices are practically inevitable in this dynamic environment.

Compounding the challenge for IT teams, with frequent changes made across the environment and no single universal management tool, changes originating in one area of the infrastructure are often not carried through to completion across other areas that are managed by other teams.

AvailabilityGuard/SAN offers end-to-end visualization that allows IT teams to coordinate activities across domains. Drawing on the strength of a community-supported knowledgebase containing thousands of potential risks, the software proactively detects risks, validates vendor best practices, and ensures the configuration is optimized.  AvailabilityGuard/SAN features:

• Automatic daily verification of the SAN fabric
• Validation that configuration changes do not introduce downtime and/or data loss risks
• Impact review of configuration changes prior to deployment
• Clear visibility into SAN configuration - end-to-end

"Historically, most IT organization have considered the SAN to be the fabric itself - the storage, the switches, the HBAs connecting them and possibly the HBAs sitting in the storage arrays as well.  While these are critical components of the SAN, in order for the SAN to function properly, you need to know what is happening above and below these components.  You really need to understand aspects such as the multipathing, the software running on the host, the file systems, the servers, as well as the virtualization - as virtualization adds a great deal of complexity between the storage, servers and networking.  In addition, you really need to understand the unique requirements of the applications and databases," said Arun Taneja, Founder and Consulting Analyst, Taneja Group. "The reality is however, in this era of highly dynamic infrastructures spanning multiple IT support services, maintaining any semblance of true understanding is easier said than done."  He continued, "AvailabilityGuard/SAN alleviates this pain by providing a single pane of glass by which to view, understand and manage the entire SAN."

"Indeed, we see this at customer sites on a daily basis.  Given the vast range of vendor technologies combined with ever-changing conditions, maintaining complete visibility and control has seemed like an unattainable ideal," said William Weber, President and CEO, Market Experts, a Continuity Software value-added distributor.  "The scary part is however, that many customers are unaware of just how 'out-of-control' their environment is, until it's too late."  He continued, "Continuity Software's AvailabilityGuard/SAN will provide a welcome relief."

"One of our most popular services is a one-week health check using AvailabilityGuard. We scan up to 500 ports / 100 physical servers, with the results summarized in a complete risk analysis report," said Doron Pinhas, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Continuity Software.  "100% of those assessed to-date have uncovered gaps and other vulnerabilities they were completely unaware of, many associated with critical systems."  He continued, "By providing customers with automated daily verification, complete visualization and comprehensive reporting and analysis, AvailabilityGuard/SAN reduces data loss and downtime risks by over 90%, thereby ensuring the highest levels of data protection and service availability possible, while also significantly increasing the overall efficiency of their SAN fabric."

The new AvailabilityGuard/SAN solution expands upon what is already the most comprehensive portfolio of service availability risk management solutions available: Continuity Software's AvailabilityGuard™ product suite, which includes:

• AvailabilityGuard/Enterprise™:  provides IT organizations with comprehensive command and control capabilities to manage service availability and business continuity readiness across their entire IT infrastructure.
• AvailabilityGuard/DR™: enables IT organizations to proactively detect disaster recovery (DR) vulnerabilities that could lead to downtime and/or data loss.
• AvailabilityGuard/Cluster™: continuously monitors high availability (HA) cluster configurations to identify downtime and data loss risks.
• AvailabilityGuard/Cloud™: provides automated detection and analysis of potential availability risks in the private cloud environment.
  

By combining AvailabilityGuard/SAN with AvailabilityGuard/Enterprise customers enjoy comprehensive, end-to-end visibility and protection across every component in the data center, from the clusters, to the HA and DR infrastructure, across the SAN, and into the cloud.  

AvailabilityGuard/SAN is now generally available and priced starting at: $20,000 per year.  

Customers interested in learning more about and/or registering for an AvailabilityGuard One Week Health Check can contact: sales@continuitysoftware.com.

About Continuity Software       


Continuity Software is the leading provider of service availability risk management solutions.  Trusted by many of the largest and most successful companies around the world, Continuity Software's award-winning software mitigates downtime and data-loss risks across the entire enterprise IT landscape, including the datacenter's disaster recovery, high availability (HA), and private cloud environments. With Continuity Software solutions, organizations can be confident that service availability, data protection, and business continuity goals will be met or exceeded 365 days a year.  For further information, please visit http://www.continuitysoftware.com, email info@continuitysoftware.com, or call: +1-888-782-8170 (United States) or +972 (3) 6470888 (Israel). 

© Continuity Software.  Continuity Software, RecoverGuard, AvailabilityGuard, AvailabilityGuard/Enterprise, AvailabilityGuard/Cloud, AvailabilityGuard/DR, AvailabilityGuard/Cluster, and AvailabilityGuard/SAN are trademarks of Continuity Software.  All other brand and product names in this announcement may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

PR Contact:
Nicole Gorman
Corporate Communications
Continuity Software
+1-508-397-0131
nicoleg@continuitysoftware.com