From PHD Virtual Technologies, ReliableDR 3.1 for Virtualized and Cloud Environments

PHD
Virtual Technologies Inc. announced ReliableDR
3.1, a DR assurance solution for businesses with virtualized and
cloud environments.

As part of the VirtualSharp acquisition
earlier this month, the company has begun the process of extending
the capabilities and customer value with the delivery of version 3.1.
It reduces the cost of IT DR testing to support recovery SLAs
demanded by businesses and compliance auditors. Unlike legacy DR
tests, which are performed once per year, ReliableDR enables DR
exercises to be performed on a daily, or even hourly, basis. It
enforces RTOs / RPOs and delivers RTA and detects stale snapshots
that are outside the RPO policy.

The upgrade include:

• vCloud Director
  Integration: VMware vCloud Director provides multi-tenant IaaS
  capabilities to allow many customers, or tenants, to run on the same
  virtual infrastructure in a self-service manner with specific
  operational policies applied to each tenant. Without it the admin
  must take extra manual steps to complete recovery. Integrating into
  the service allows the recovery process to automate those final steps
  to ensure that existing Certified Recovery Points are imported
  automatically into the appropriate organization during failover to
  ensure fastest RTA for the application of the corresponding cloud
  policy for each tenant.

• Always-on VMs (Continuous
  Dependencies): Always-on VM technology helps users achieve fast
  RTAs, automate granular service compliance when multiple services
  share the same application components, and improve the utilization of
  DR resources by turning them into an isolated test environment
  leveraging real production data. This feature allows applications to
  be DR tested separately while reusing the same base services like
  domain controllers and databases. With the VMs remaining powered-on,
  users can test multiple services that use common VMs, as well as
  failover more quickly because the boot sequence is eliminated from
  the recovery process.

• Advanced Reporting: How the data
  is reported is important to saving time and mitigating compliance
  risk. The latest update enhances existing reporting capabilities by
  sending report information to stakeholders without administration
  intervention. Additionally, those stakeholders have access to
  historical analysis reporting without the administrators spending
  countless hours producing reports. In addition, an Excel plug-in to
  historical DR test data and runbooks is available to produce ad hoc
  reports. This is crucial for clients in the financial, healthcare and
  government sectors that have strict compliance requirements.

• User and Stakeholder Auditing:
  The program extends DR compliance monitoring to end users and other
  BC/DR stakeholders like auditors and compliance officers so activity
  can be monitored without requiring specialized IT staff involvement,
  which will appeal to regulated sectors with multiple stakeholders
  stringent requirements for auditing and reporting.

• Web-oriented Architecture: The
  program can be embedded into the customers’ own management portal to
  improve branded service and provide a user experience within a
  centralized management framework.

As a web application, it can be
driven and
queried from other applications. For instance:

• An application performance dashboard
  can obtain DR compliance information from the software, and present
  it in a single pane of glass;

• An application delivery process can
  include a call to it to automatically create a recovery specification
  when the application is moved to production.

"Adding the ReliableDR product
to the PHD Virtual family of products is a winner for our customers
and partners seeking recovery assurance that is so critical to DR
planning," said Joe Noonan, senior product manager, PHD
Virtual. "This new release of the product provides even more
automation and reporting capabilities to administrators running
virtualized and cloud environments to guarantee their applications
and business services will recover as seamlessly as possible to
ensure BC."

"Our vibrant Technology
Alliance Provider (TAP) community continues to innovate and bring new
solutions to customers that can accelerate the transition to hybrid
cloud environments," said Parag Patel, VP, global strategic alliances, VMware, Inc. "We are pleased to see PHD Virtual
announce support for automated failover-to-vCloud Director, in what
becomes another proof point of the sustainability and flexibility
that vSphere provides our customers."