VMware Cuts Price On Cloudy Disaster Recovery Services
VMware is rolling out a disaster recovery service that it says will extend the service to the public cloud by making is less expensive and complex.
The vCloud Hybrid Service – Disaster Recovery solution is built on VMware's vSphere hypervisor stack that provides virtualization for X86-based servers. The company said its new service is designed to continuously replicate virtual machines to a virtual datacenter via its hybrid service.
The company said the disaster recover strategy aims to help customers avoid the need to own tertiary datacenters while safeguarding applications that remained vulnerable due to the high cost of including them in disaster recovery plans.
"Typically, disaster recovery services require expensive professional services to install and maintain," Jerry Sanchez, VMware's vice president of hosting operations, said in a statement. Customers' data and applications would be mirrored in vCloud Hybrid Service, "with the benefits of a cloud-based economic model," he added.
The replication and hosting service targets businesses that have been unable to afford a disaster recovery capability as part of its business continuity plans. It also targets customers looking to replace in-house systems with secure asynchronous replication within the vSphere virtual environment.
The disaster recovery offering underscores VMware's strategy of helping customer's stretch their IT budgets so they can afford to add new and cheaper cloud-based applications. "Overall, IT budgets are nominally flat," CEO Patrick Gelsinger noted in a recent keynote speech at the Interop conference. "If the budget is flat, and I need to invest a whole bunch in creating this new environment for [cloud-based applications], where does it come from?"
The answer, according to Gelsinger is "by saving money in my existing client/server and mainframe environments. This puts enormous pressure on IT on how to accomplish both of those simultaneously."
As IT budgets are squeezed, there appears to be a growing recognition of the need to protect business applications against outages and failures that can bring down data centers. The key hurdle is cost. According to industry estimates, only about 5 percent of business applications are protected by disaster recovery tools.
Market researcher Gartner predicts that adoption of cloud-based disaster recovery-as-a-service is expected to gain traction among small and mid-size enterprises as prices drop. But the same services will obviously also be available to the most extreme scale customers that VMware has as well. And the largest ESXi and vSphere shops have to ask themselves the same question: Can I do this cheaper and better than VMware, or does it make sense to use a cloud service for disaster recovery?
VMware said the disaster recovery service is available immediately at its five vCloud Hybrid Service datacenters in the U.S. and U.K. The service offers a "recovery point objective" of up to 15 minutes at a cost of $835 a month. That price includes 1 TB of storage and stand-by cloud capacity.
The disaster recovery plan also offers self-service asynchronous replication, failover and failback along with remote management and monitoring. The recovery point objective for the service ranges between 15 minutes to 24 hours.
The monthly price tag also includes stand-by compute capacity and two seven-day disaster recovery tests, VMware said.
