VirtualSharp and Spanish AvantaaS for Assured Recovery as a Service

VirtualSharp Software, provider of automated Disaster Recovery solutions for private and public clouds, and AvantaaS Cloud Services, S.L., channel cloud service provider in Spain, announced the availability of a RaaS for applications running on VMware vSphere.

By 2014, 30 percent of midsize companies will have adopted recovery-in-the-cloud, also known as RaaS, to support IT operations recovery, up from just over 1 percent today, according to Gartner, Inc. "RaaS addresses well-recognized ‘pain points’ in IT disaster recovery management, including the need for frequent recovery-readiness testing and the cost of dedicated recovery floor space and facilities," according to John Morency, research vice president at Gartner.

AvantaaS will offer a zero-footprint solution to customers wishing to protect their applications to the cloud, leveraging VirtualSharp’s ReliableDR, a Disaster Recovery orchestration solution. The new RaaS offering will include automated Disaster Recovery testing to measure RTOs and enforce RPOs at the application level. AvantaaS will make this service available through its network of integrators and consulting partners throughout Spain.

"Our customers are demanding RaaS because it solves the traditional headaches of Disaster Recovery by removing complexity and risk," said Luis Garcia San Luis, Managing Director at AvantaaS. "As virtualization continues to penetrate the market, we expect RaaS to be one of the cloud killer applications, allowing customers to transition into cloud computing with peace of mind and increased cost efficiency."

"RaaS is the ideal solution for our Disaster Recovery needs," commented Manuel Pastrana, CIO of the Spanish Olympic Committee. "We do not have the spare internal capacity to have dedicated Disaster Recovery resources, but we need to be able to recover very quickly even in a worst-case scenario. RaaS is the answer, leveraging shared resources in a public cloud under a managed service."

"We are very pleased to be partnering with AvantaaS and to deliver the benefits of DR Assurance on demand and as a service," said Carlos Escapa, CEO of VirtualSharp Software. "This partnership will enable customers to protect their applications in cloud environments without additional hardware or software investments."

One of the features of AvantaaS’s new service is a zero footprint model that leverages VirtualSharp’s ReliableDR technology. With this architecture, integrators and end customers will be able to obtain protection from the AvantaaS cloud without requiring software installation or special hardware. The service is available for customers running any version of VMware vSphere, including Essentials and Essentials Plus licenses.

On the AvantaaS cloud, the replicated applications and data are stored securely, and tested for recoverability on a regular basis, at least daily. Recovery policy will be set by end customers or their integrators and may include customized processes that will be verified by the AvantaaS cloud. If the SLAs are breached, alerts will be issued to cloud services managers as well as application owners, so that remedial action can be taken and verified without needing to perform full-fledged Disaster Recovery tests.

VirtualSharp Software was founded in 2010 to address the new disaster recovery needs for the cloud era. VirtualSharp, an elite-level VMware Technology Alliance Partner, develops Disaster Recovery software for private and public clouds that certifies the recoverability of services running in the cloud. VirtualSharp’s software enables resiliency for virtual IT infrastructures and alignment between IT Disaster Recovery and Corporate Business Continuity Planning.

AvantaaS offers its solutions through its partner network, allowing them to augment their portfolio with advanced cloud services and without implementing their own infrastructure. AvantaaS partners’ customer knowledge combined with AvantaaS expertise is a fit for end customers, allowing the delivery of customized services adapted to each need. A unified self-provisioning portal lets both integrators and end customers to manage all the service configurations, giving them control over their cloud-based resources.