VMware Site Recovery Manager to Deliver Simplified and Automated Disaster Recovery Across the Data Center

VMware, Inc., the virtualization leader, today announced VMware Site Recovery Manager, a pioneering new product for disaster recovery automation. The new software will be among the many products and solutions showcased this week at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco.

"Disaster recovery is one of the key factors driving customer adoption and standardization on the VMware Infrastructure platform," said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions at VMware. "VMware Site Recovery Manager introduces disaster recovery automation and management capabilities to reduce the risk, cost and complexity of organizations' disaster recovery plans."

Although organizations face an urgent need for effective disaster recovery, recovery from site failures remains one of the most difficult and complex aspects of IT. Traditional disaster recovery solutions are slow and prone to failures because they involve many manual and complex steps, are difficult to test, and require expensive duplication of the production data center infrastructure to ensure reliable recovery. As a result, organizations find themselves unable to provide sufficient disaster recovery protection for more than a small subset of their production systems.

VMware Site Recovery Manager is designed to simplify and automate the disaster recovery process so that customers can reliably recover from data center outages in hours rather than days. Working with VMware Infrastructure, VMware Site Recovery Manager can help eliminate the complexity and unreliability of manual recovery and also eliminate the cost and complexity of maintaining duplicate but idle infrastructure at a recovery site.

"Growing awareness of the business consequences of data center outages and regulations including SOX and HIPPA that mandate disaster recovery are helping to raise awareness of the importance and preparation required to ensure successful recovery. Server virtualization solutions are actually enabling faster and more reliable disaster recovery," said Mark Bowker, analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. "VMware Site Recovery Manager provides an effective way to simplify and automate disaster recovery in order to rapidly restore business operations when disasters occur."

"We're already taking advantage of the core capabilities of VMware Infrastructure like hardware independence and encapsulation of an entire system on disk to make big improvements in our disaster recovery plans," said Cory Miller, senior IT operations manager at Schwan's Shared Services, LLC. "We're excited about VMware Site Recovery Manager because it provides the centralized management and automation that we need to meet ever more demanding recovery time objectives reliably and affordably."

VMware and its storage partners including EMC, EqualLogic, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, Lefthand Networks and Network Appliance are working to support the use of leading storage replication capabilities with VMware Site Recovery Manager. As a result of this collaboration, customers would be able to confidently and easily deploy powerful disaster recovery solutions that integrate the capabilities of VMware and its storage partners.

"EMC and VMware share a common vision for complete data center disaster recovery solutions that are simple, automated and reliable," said Chuck Hollis, vice president of Technology Alliances at EMC. "We have been working together to integrate EMC's market-leading remote replication solutions with VMware Site Recovery Manager. This initiative will help customers protect their virtual infrastructure using the same proven EMC storage systems and software they've relied on for years in their physical infrastructure."

"We believe VMware Site Recovery Manager's planned integration with the PS Series will provide a simplified disaster recovery solution based on a highly reliable replicated iSCSI SAN," said John Joseph, vice president of Marketing at EqualLogic. "VMware and EqualLogic's collaboration reduces key challenges IT managers face in architecting disaster-proof infrastructures and demonstrates our shared commitment to facilitate affordable and resilient data centers."

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