VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4

VMware, Inc. announced the availability of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4, enabling automated, reliable and affordable disaster recovery.

Part of the VMware vCenter Product Family, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides automated disaster recovery for virtual environments. Now, with added support for Network File System (NFS) based storage replication, compatibility with VMware vSphere 4, and simplified ‘many-to-one’ failover using shared recovery sites, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager makes it even easier for customers to confidently protect all of their virtual environments.

Disaster recovery is critical for companies to protect corporate data, but has typically been difficult to achieve due to costs and complexity. Disasters in the datacenter – whether they are caused by hurricanes, earthquakes, power outages, or other unexpected events – can result in downtime for business critical applications. Extended downtime significantly impacts revenues, service level agreements (SLAs) and business operations. Traditional solutions for disaster recovery require complex, manual recovery processes, and can be very difficult to set up, test and keep up-to-date. Regulatory requirements can also present challenges to disaster recovery solutions. As a result, organizations only provide disaster recovery plans for the most critical applications.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager addresses these challenges by centralizing management of recovery plans and automating the testing and recovery process, resulting in rapid, reliable, affordable disaster recovery. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, originally released in 2008, has become the defacto standard for automating disaster recovery, with more than 2,000 customers and support from 12 leading storage vendors.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4 now provides:

• VMware vSphere 4 Support. Customers can now take advantage of the capabilities of VMware vSphere 4, including Fault Tolerance, for better performance and protection of applications.
• Expanded Storage Support. Lets users leverage iSCSI, Fiber Channel, and NFS storage and replication solutions.
• Many-to-One Failover. Protects multiple production sites with automated failover into a single, shared recovery site.

"VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4 dramatically simplifies the disaster recovery process for customers so they can meet demanding business needs for disaster recovery, including regulatory compliance issues," said Raghu Raghuram, vice president and general manager, server business unit, for VMware. "Now with many-to-one failover and expanded storage support, more customers can take advantage of low-cost disaster recovery and gain peace of mind that their data is safe in the event of a disaster."

"Disaster recovery is one of the most daunting and complicated challenges for IT organizations, and it isn’t getting any easier as applications proliferate and expectations with regard to recovery times shorten," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage and executive strategies at IDC. "Virtualization of server and storage environments are playing a key role in helping companies reduce the costs and complexities associated with implementing, testing, and executing a full disaster recovery, yet their effectiveness increasingly depends upon solutions that automate the fast expanding disaster recovery process itself."

"In my 25 years of IT experience, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager is one of the best solutions that I have ever implemented," said Ed Belliveau, principal systems engineer, Bentley University. "With the latest Site Recovery Manager improvements and features, coupled with integration with VMware vSphere, disaster recovery preparation is much easier."