VirtualSharp Upgrades Virtual Machine Disaster Recovery

VirtualSharp Software's latest disaster recovery software product for virtual environments, ReliableDR 3.0, features application-specific service level agreements (SLAs), role-based access control, an embeddable dashboard, and other improvements. The disaster recovery and DR testing products automate a previously painstaking process for businesses of keeping track of virtual machines (VMs) in an increasingly sprawling virtual environment.

"When they actually went to do the disaster recovery test, they had a whole bunch of VMs scattered around and it was actually difficult to keep track of what was where and how to get an application back in production," said Carlos Escapa, co-founder and CEO of VirtualSharp.

Escapa unveiled ReliableDR 3.0, which will be available in the first quarter of 2012, at the CloudBeat 2011 conference last week in Redwood City, Calif. VirtualSharp was founded in Spain in 2010 and recently opened a U.S. office in McLean, Va.

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ReliableDR 3.0 delivers an integrated, vertical solution to do disaster recovery and DR testing and certification across the IT stack, from storage to the application layer, Escapa explained.

Highlights in version 3.0 include the ability for hosting providers to do DR testing and recoverability in multitenant environments. Hosts can also set unique SLAs for different applications based on a customer's preference and can also set up role-based access control. The product's Web-oriented architecture enables customers to view test results from mobile wireless devices such as smartphones. And ReliableDR provides an application programming interface (API) to integrate a dashboard for monitoring the system through the host's portal or directly to customers.

While VirtualSharp has sold ReliableDR licenses to businesses and enterprises, with the introduction of ReliableDR 3.0, it will now sell to cloud service providers who wish to offer DR as a service to their customers, Escapa said.

VirtualSharp is a VMware Technology Alliance Partner, and Escapa and other VirtualSharp executives came from VMware. The founders came up with the idea for VirtualSharp after hearing from many VMware customers seeking a solution to automate DR in their virtualized data centers. EMC and Microsoft have automated DR software similar to VirtualSharp's, said Escapa, but those offerings are only focused on storage and servers, respectively.

One VirtualSharp customer is Baron Funds, an investment management firm based in New York City. It had been using VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for site disaster recovery and DR testing, but found the product disappointing.

"With SRM, DR testing was still taking a long time to prepare for and it still took a huge effort to get all of their systems up and tested over the weekend," according to a case study of Baron Funds provided by VirtualSharp.

Since deploying ReliableDR, Baron Funds said it has significantly reduced the amount of time required to prepare for each DR test and is confident if there were an actual disaster, it could recover "quickly and easily."

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