EMC Data Replication With VMware Site Recovery Manager

EMC Corporation announced it will offer comprehensive technology support for VMware Site Recovery Manager.

VMware Site Recovery Manager is a pioneering new product for disaster recovery management and automation. Part of VMware’s industry-leading suite of management and automation products for the datacenter, VMware Site Recovery Manager simplifies business continuity planning and testing, and reduces the risk and complexity associated with implementing disaster recovery.

VMware Site Recovery Manager, when deployed in conjunction with EMC’s industry leading portfolio of replication software, will enable customers to rapidly bring their virtualized servers and mission critical information online at a secondary site.

After thorough testing and qualification, new storage replication adapters for EMC’s replication software, including EMC SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility), EMC Celerra Replicator, EMC MirrorView and EMC RecoverPoint, will be integrated with Site Recovery Manager to ensure rapid, reliable, manageable and affordable data recovery in VMware environments.

EMC replication solutions that protect physical and virtual storage assets are widely deployed around the world and have a proven track record of protecting, replicating and ensuring the availability of business-critical data and applications. An added benefit of this joint solution is the ability to automate and test EMC and VMware disaster recovery capabilities to ensure proper automated fail-over of their infrastructure. The technology integration and testing completed to ensure that EMC replication software is interoperable with VMware Site Recovery Manager is part of EMC’s ongoing commitment to offer complete support for VMware environments and add greater value to mutual customers. EMC and VMware have worked together during the VMware Site Recovery Manager development and beta programs to ensure that customers will be able to deploy VMware for Site Recovery Manager with EMC’s replication software.

With EMC integration support for Site Recovery Manager, companies and organizations of all sizes can leverage their existing EMC information infrastructure investments to enable simplified automated failover and recovery capabilities for their VMware environments. Whether it is large data centers using SRDF to replicate between sites, mid-size environments being replicated via IP (internet protocol) using Celerra Replicator or MirrorView or the need for network-based array-independent replication via RecoverPoint, EMC offers customers a comprehensive range of business continuity solutions.

"Virtualization has become a critical element in the data center and disaster recovery is always top of mind amongst customers deploying virtual environments," said EMC’s Frank Hauck, Executive Vice President, Global Marketing and Customer Satisfaction. "Tight integration with VMware Site Recovery Managers enables EMC replication solutions to provide more value in VMware deployments. Customers of all sizes with both EMC and non-EMC networked storage will be able to leverage EMC’s decades of experience in business continuity with the new EMC replication adapters to enjoy the benefits of Site Recovery Manager’s server and array fail-over process."

"Broad support of VMware Site Recovery Manager illustrates EMC’s commitment to enabling customers like Hosted Solutions to easily take advantage of new technology while protecting existing investments in our EMC technology," said Brian Baker, Vice President, Sales at Hosted Solutions, a leading provider of high quality Data Center and Managed Hosting services that maintain and protect customers’ mission-critical IT systems and applications and a beta tester for VMware Site Recovery Manager. "Having the choice to use EMC’s industry-leading replication products with VMWare Site Recovery Manager for a virtual disaster recovery plan is very compelling. The integration between EMC RecoverPoint and VMware Site Recovery Manager enabled us to successfully conduct non-disruptive tests of our failover plans both onsite and remotely."

Customers will benefit from continued investment protection for existing infrastructure with heterogeneous support for Site Recovery Manager to implement a robust solution that ensures data integrity of their VMware virtual environments. Organizations with non-EMC network storage systems can take advantage of the RecoverPoint storage adapter, which is the only heterogeneous replication product integrated with Site Recovery Management today.

"VMware Site Recovery Manager and EMC’s data replication products ensure a fully supported and effective disaster recovery solution," said Parag Patel, Vice President, Alliances at VMware. "Our joint offerings protect customers’ EMC technology investments, enable them to use EMC’s broad portfolio of recovery solutions and, most importantly, ensure business continuity with instant failover of their servers, applications and data."

New EMC consulting and implementation services around VMware Site Recovery Manager will be available as part of the product release. EMC will also provide best practices with documented reference architectures, installation and optimization guides, and proven EMC product interoperability with other vendors’ products through EMC E-Lab testing and VMware certification.

The storage adapters will be available from VMware for free to customers with a VMware Site Recovery Manager license when the product is generally available later during second quarter of 2008.