RackWare Brings Cloud-Based DR for Physical and Virtual Workloads

RackWare, Inc., the software provider that integrates data center and cloud resources into a scalable and intelligently managed computing environment, announced the availability of its RackWare Management Module (RMM) 3.0.

Providing a simple and cost-effective solution for enterprise data centers, whether traditional or cloud-based, RMM 3.0 lowers the cost of DR, allowing enterprises to ensure protection of mission-critical IT resources in case of planned and unplanned outages. With RMM 3.0, enterprises can extend existing IT architecture into the cloud for minimal disruption.

RackWare’s flexible and automated cloud management solution enables enterprises to move their workloads between private, public or hybrid cloud environments, while allowing them to expand and contract resources as they are needed. With the announcement of RMM 3.0, RackWare combines its intelligent scaling and migration capabilities with cloud-based DR, providing enterprises with a complete cloud management solution for business-critical use cases. The newly-added capability provides whole-server protection and failover at a fraction of the cost of running a replicated data center architected for HA or clustering technologies.

Requiring hours or days to implement and providing maximum availability-to-cost ratio, RMM 3.0 empowers enterprises to execute DR for the modern data center. The new solution provides redundancy, reducing the headache of purchasing, implementing and maintaining a full replicated DR site. By utilizing flexible cloud infrastructure, protecting workloads can be done in as little as one hour and testing can be as frequent as needed. The solution brings physical, virtual, and cloud based workloads to the level of protection that mission-critical systems protected by expensive and complex HA solutions enjoy. Moreover, with DR that can be used with any cloud infrastructure, RMM 3.0 frees enterprises from vendor lock-in, allowing them to adapt along with their evolving infrastructure needs.

Key new functionalities of RMM 3.0 include:

• Cloning of production servers – enabling full replication of the OS, applications and data from production servers into cloud recovery instances;
• Incremental synchronization – changes in the OS, applications and data are all synchronized to the recovery instances as the production instances change, with only differences transmitted, saving bandwidth and resources;
• Cloud-to-Cloud – production and recovery instances span heterogeneous cloud infrastructure or remain in the same infrastructure, across Amazon, RackSpace, CenturyLink, VMware, IBM Softlayer, and OpenStack, among others;
• Physical-to-Cloud – physical production servers in traditional data centers can be protected by cloned instances into any cloud;
• Failover – should an outage occur on the production system, the recovery instance is fully synchronized and automatically takes over workload processing;
• Failback – once the production server is restored, the reovery instance synchronizes all change that took place during the outage back to the production server for normalized operations;
• Complete protection – RTO and RPO exceed expectations by expanding the scope of DR to include workloads that are normally under-protected.

RMM 3.0 is available in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, India and Japan.

“RackWare provides a solid new DR solution that will allow us to dramatically reduce downtime during an outage with failover capabilities of complex and expensive HA solutions, and at a fraction of the cost,” said Mark Kocour, associate principal, global IT for ZS Associates, Inc. “Using the new RMM 3.0 DR solution, we are able to easily extend our DR strategy into the cloud without having to buy additional specialized hardware or duplicate our production systems. This allows us to protect a larger number of workloads across our data center, while increasing their availability.“

“The RMM helps us help our customers,” said Steve Paton, VP of infrastructure, Peer1 Hosting. “We’re currently taking advantage of using RMM as a migration tool to help minimize downtime. The technology allows us to seamlessly and easily migrate from any location to bare metal and/or the cloud at a low cost compared to other solutions on the market today. The new DR component of RMM 3.0 looks fantastic. We’re looking forward to deploying that as well and offering our customers full protection of their workloads in the data center.”

“The migration and elasticity capabilities of the RMM)technology are incredibly valuable,” said Mike Strohl, CEO, Entisys Solutions, Inc. “We’re especially excited about the workload mobility features of the new RMM DR solution which allows us to fully protect our customers’ servers and data using a variety of different recovery sites. This gives us the unique ability to diversify the risk of downtime in our customers’ data center by utilizing a variety of cloud infrastructures.”

“Given the dire consequences and high costs of downtime, having an effective DR system in place is vital for all organizations today,” said Jim Rapoza, senior research analyst, Aberdeen Group. “By taking advantage of cloud-based DR, businesses that haven’t implemented DR because of the cost and complexity can now leverage this important capabili,and avoid the costs of downtime.“

“DR is an essential element of any business’ IT. However, so far enterprises have been limited to either complex, expensive HA solutions or tape backup solutions with lengthy restoration times, not ideal for a business that needs to get backup and running quickly after an outage or natural disaster,” said Sash Sunkara, CEO and co-founder, RackWare. “With the launch of RMM 3.0, we extend our intelligent automation and policy framework to enable business-crtical use cases. Our cost-effective DR solution allows enterprises to ensure 360 degree protection of the majority of workloads in their data center. We believe that this unprecedented level of flexibility and protection at a low cost will be an industry game changer.“