VMware pitches into DR

Disaster Recovery (DR) has, for the majority of businesses, been a huge compromise between effectiveness and cost. Every business has aspired to have enterprise class DR until they have seen the cost, which traditionally has included the replication of complete standby infrastructures. Their cheapest alternative has been to gamble that disaster will never happen to them.

The cloud is changing much of this, making DR capabilities simpler, cheaper and far easier to implement. The range of vendors offering DR tools and services is also expanding, with one of the latest being VMware, which has just VMware.

This is a new cloud-based DR service that provides a continuously available recovery site for VMware virtualised datacentres. VMware claims it is simple to set up, can be self-managed, and is a fraction of the cost and complexity of traditional DR solutions. The service is available immediately in all five vCloud Hybrid Service datacentres in the U.S. and U.K.

Built on vSphere, the service continuously replicates virtual machines to a virtual datacentre within vCloud Hybrid Service, with a recovery point objective (RPO) of up to 15 minutes. Cost starts at  $835 a month including 1TB of storage and standby cloud capacity.

“Everyone wants enterprise-class disaster recovery, but without the complexity and cost of traditional DR,” said Jerry Sanchez, vice president of Hosting Operations, Planview. “We know how to administer vSphere, so the simplicity and familiarity of administering vCloud Hybrid Service - Disaster Recovery is just as easy, making this service a natural fit for us. Typically, DR services require expensive professional services to install and maintain. With the VMware solution, the data and applications are simply mirrored in vCloud Hybrid Service, ready to go whenever trouble strikes, and with the benefits of a cloud-based economic model.”

For many businesses, DR has involved maintaining exact duplicates of datacentre hardware configurations, more than doubling costs, and the challenges of maintaining the same configuration meant DR tests were often difficult, highly manual, and infrequently performed. The new service offers an automated process for replicating and recovering critical applications and data in a warm standby environment.

VMware says that the service is ideal for businesses with limited or no DR solution in place today, or customers looking to replace a traditional offering with a service provider or one that is managed in-house. It provides simple and secure asynchronous replication and failover for vSphere virtual environments.

It also provides opportunities for the partner community through offering the service as a value added solution to customers who already have deployed infrastructure, or offer a comprehensive solution for net-new deployments, creating the ability for bigger opportunities, while continuing to deliver value to customers.