VMware announced that VMware Site Recovery Manager, a pioneering product for disaster recovery management and automation, will be available for order next week with general availability expected to follow within 30 days. VMware Site Recovery Manager, which is part of VMware’s suite of management and automation products for the datacenter, leverages virtualization to simplify business continuity planning and testing, and reduces the risk and complexity associated with executing disaster recovery.

Traditional recovery plans leave organizations exposed to risk of extended downtime because they are laborious to set up, time-consuming to maintain, and difficult to test. As a result, only a subset of important systems can be adequately protected. For example, traditional disaster recovery plans for datacenters require extensive documentation consisting of hundreds of pages of instructions contained in runbooks that are nearly impossible to keep accurate and up-to-date. The complexity of the manual recovery processes in these runbooks makes it difficult for organizations to reliably recover within their recovery time objectives. Traditional non-virtualized systems have extensive dependencies on hardware configurations, which make consistent automation of the process extremely difficult if not impossible.

“Effective disaster recovery has been a significant challenge for many organizations,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president, products and solutions at VMware. “With the delivery of VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware removes hurdles associated with disaster recovery planning and implementation. Through our innovative disaster recovery testing, management and automation capabilities, we bring predictability back into the hands of IT and help eliminate risks associated with human error.”

Site Recovery Manager works seamlessly with VMware Infrastructure, VMware VirtualCenter, and replication software from storage partners to provide integrated disaster recovery management and automation. It provides:

• Integrated management of disaster recovery plans. Create, update and document recovery plans directly from VMware VirtualCenter.
• Non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans. Execute automated tests of recovery plans in an isolated testing environment using the recovery plan that would be used in an actual failover. Hardware configuration dependencies are eliminated and testing can occur without impacting production systems.
• Automated failover and recovery. Automate execution of the recovery process, eliminating many of the slow and unreliable manual processes common in traditional disaster recovery.

“Regulatory compliance and our drive for providing exceptional services to our customers is a large factor for our interest and involvement in VMware Site Recovery Manager,” said Donald Wilkins, director of IT at Navicure. “Site Recovery Manager allows us to far exceed our recovery objectives in an automated manner and lets our IT staff do disaster recovery the right way - the only way.”

“Brit Insurance chose VMware Site Recovery Manager after evaluating the advantages offered by centralized management and complete automation of disaster recovery plans over physical alternatives,” said Brett Hockly, group infrastructure services manager at Brit Insurance. “As a long-term VMware virtualization user, our team is clear on the benefits of virtual infrastructure, having a disaster recovery solution we can test without jeopardizing our live systems makes our decision to standardise on VMware clearly correct.”

VMware Site Recovery Manager leverages customers’ investment in storage replication software from VMware’s storage partners including 3PAR, Dell, EMC, FalconStor, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, LeftHand Networks and NetApp. VMware is working with partners across its storage partner ecosystem to ensure that customers can use Site Recovery Manager with their storage system and software platform of choice. As a result of this collaboration, customers can deploy advanced disaster recovery solutions with the full support of both VMware and their storage provider.