FalconStor's RecoverTrac 2.5 software introduces new GUIs that reduce the time it takes to set up data replication to remote sites and speeds up the actual recovery of data in a disaster.

The software now also allows dissimilar hardware and virtual servers to fail over and failback gives users the ability to test disaster recovery without disrupting business operations. Previously, RecoverTrac did not allow virtual machines to recover back to physical ones.

RecoverTrac 2.5 now comes standard with FalconStor's Continuous Data Protector and Network Storage Server software. Those additions allow any data changes to be immediately and automatically replicated offsite to a disaster recovery facility. Because data is continuously replicated, users can recover services in minutes or hours compared to days with earlier iterations, according to Darrell Riddle, senior director of product marketing at FalconStor.

"Recovery works from a single email all the way up to an entire Exchange system," Riddle said. "With this release, customers have the ability to recover many machines at once. Before, for example, if you were recovering a Sharepoint file, made up from multiple systems, you couldn't have machines recover in parallel. It happened in serial. That changes with this."

RecoverTrac 2.5 is integrated with VMware vSphere 5 and Hyper-V and offers support for hardware templates that enables failover and failback between any combination of physical and virtual servers and between dissimilar hardware.