VirtualSharp ReliableDR Performs Integrated Disaster Recovery To Private And Public Clouds

VirtualSharp Software has announced a new version of its ReliableDR product, which performs integrated disaster recovery over a user's collections of assets to private and public clouds. Version 3.0 adds features such as multitenancy, which is intended to make the product more attractive to hosters; application-specific service level agreements that enable users to set recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives individually for each application; role-based access control; a Web-oriented architecture; and an embeddable dashboard. The company, whose automated disaster recovery testing and certification products have been in use primarily in Europe, is using the new release in an attempt to make more of an inroads into the U.S. market.

While one might typically expect primarily larger companies to be interested in such a product, the company has actually gotten a lot of attention from small to midsize businesses, says Carlos Escapa, CEO of the McLean, Va., company. While other vendors have components of disaster recovery solutions, such as configuration management and backup, the distinction that the VirtualSharp product has is that it ensures that data recovery goes all the way back to the application, he says.

The new features, such as role-based access control, give both IT and non-IT people the ability to have access to the recovery dashboard, meaning that varying types of staff, ranging from compliance officers to auditors to applications owners, have the ability to look at the same data, Escapa says. The Web-oriented architecture makes it possible for the end user to request that an application be protected, he says. For increased protection, hosters can not only perform disaster recovery tests but can also set the frequency of them. This also gives hosters the ability to fix any problems discovered during the process.

"The offering from VirtualSharp changes [things] quite a bit by making cloud disaster recovery for VMware environments easy and far less expensive than traditional solutions," says Paul Burns, president of analyst firm Neovise. "This is the sort of solution that could really accelerate the use of cloud environments for DR. The offering from VirtualSharp is initially focused on VMware environments. But as more types of environments are supported and more cloud providers offer the VirtualSharp capabilities, cloud-based DR should grow dramatically. The other thing I like about VirtualSharp is that they are going beyond traditional approaches to DR. Instead of customers waiting for a real disaster to test their recovery capabilities, VirtualSharp makes it feasible to verify them on an ongoing basis. This makes the solution attractive even to those customers that continue to use their own private infrastructures as recovery sites."

Version 3.0 is scheduled to be available in the first quarter of next year at prices ranging from $300 to $1,200 per virtual machine, depending on the configuration and volume. Users of Version 2.0 can upgrade for free. At this point, the product supports only VMware, though the company expects to support the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor at some point in the future, Escapa says.

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