VMworld 2016: VMware Touts Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery for Businesses
For businesses that want to deploy a disaster recovery solution to protect their data, VMware thinks it can help them find an answer. Where? In the cloud, naturally.
Tucked among the multitude of cloud-related announcements VMware made this week at the VMworld conference in Last Vegas was one directly related to disaster recovery. The company announced vCloud Availability for its vCloud Director service, which it said will let its cloud partners offer “simple, cost-effective cloud-based disaster recovery services that seamlessly support customers’ vSphere environments by leveraging native vSphere replication capabilities.” [Explore all our live coverage from VMworld 2016 here.]
New Cloud Capabilities
There’s a lot of VMware products and services to unpack there that some businesses might not be familiar with. First, vCloud Director lets cloud service providers build differentiated cloud services that are hybrid-aware and targeted at enterprises. VMware’s vSphere is the company’s core cloud virtualization platform.
The new cloud-based disaster recovery solution will be designed expressly for VMware vCloud Air Network service providers, which is VMware’s network of more than 4,200 cloud service providers worldwide. The new vCloud Availability solution is designed to be easy to operate and easy for businesses to adopt. VMware stated there will be a “radically simple on premises installation process” for the solution, which will “enable further monetization of existing VMware cloud environments based on VMware vCloud Director's multi-tenant cloud management capabilities.”
What does all that mean for businesses? Companies will be able to work with VMware’s cloud partners, which will use the new offering to build a cloud-based disaster recovery solution.
Yanbing Li, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s storage and availability business unit, said at a news conference that the company leveraged the technology it built for on-premises disaster recovery — vSphere replication and its Site Recovery Manager — to create the new cloud offering.
“A few key things that happened around building that service, from a technology point of view, is that besides the core replication and orchestration capabilities, we are building in multitenancy support because that’s what you need in the cloud environment,” she said.
Benefits to Businesses of Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery
In hybrid cloud environments, Li said, disaster recovery “has been the No. 1 use case request.”
For businesses that have on-premises data centers, using the cloud for disaster recovery is the best and least risky way for them to experience the cloud, Li added. Companies using the cloud for disaster recovery benefit from low capital investments and capacity that is much more scalable, she said.
“It’s definitely one of the top business drivers for our vCloud Air services,” she said, adding that VMware wants to make it easy for its cloud partners to build a disaster recovery service.
Li said that small to medium-sized businesses “have lots of needs” related to cloud-based disaster recovery, but said VMware has also seen demand from larger enterprises to put thousands of virtual machines into the cloud for disaster recovery.
