You've all seen it - the secondary data center gets out of sync because of configuration changes at the primary site. You have a production environment that constantly changes. You manually apply changes to the secondary data center and you miss some changes. Continuity Software introduced a software-as-a-service offering last week that claims to help IT avoid this problem.

The company’s RecoverGuard for Disaster Recovery automatically identifies disaster recovery vulnerabilities before data is lost. It monitors as many as 1,600 gap signatures from its knowledgebase for differences between the primary and secondary site and provides visibility into the disaster recovery package IT is using. RecoverGuard for Disaster Recovery monitors data completeness, data inconsistency, SLA breaches, data accessibility and tampering, and offers configuration best practices (Compare Data Backup and Replication products).

The software discovers information on storage hardware, host computers and databases and monitors it for configuration changes. Each error the software detects generates an alert that Continuity responds to with information on how to solve the issue.

Continuity is targeting companies with 60 servers - 30 at the primary data center and 30 at the secondary data center. The company offers a 48-hour proof of concept to start the service off. It claims that almost 100% of organizations that do the proof of concept will convert to RecoverGuard for Disaster Recovery monitoring.

RecoverGuard for Disaster Recovery is $2,000 per protected server per year. Continuity will notify the customer of urgent issues by telephone and e-mail and follow up with periodic reports, conference calls and meetings.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.