A Better Way to Ease Disaster Recovery Chores?

Every company fears an unforeseen event, such as a fire, flood, or hurricane but needs to be prepared for such catastrophic possibilities. Such preparation has been time consuming, tedious and often ineffective, so vendors are trying to streamline the task.The new VMware Site Recovery Manager, part of the companys suite of management and automation tools for the datacenter, represents one such attempt. The product works with works with VMware Infrastructure, VMware VirtualCenter, and replication software from storage partners to provide integrated disaster recovery management and automation.

One of the big challenges with recovery plans is the constantly changing data center configurations. Often companies have plans that worked one, two, six or 12 months ago but are not longer relevant. VMware Site Recovery Manager features integrated management of disaster recovery plans, so users can create, update and document recovery plans directly from VMware VirtualCenter. A non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans feature executes periodic automated testing of recovery plans and associated equipment. In addition, an automated failover and recovery helps companies eliminate many of the manual processes common in traditional disaster recovery.

VMware has been gaining traction because of its virtualization features. Building off of a number of conquests, the company is moving into new areas, such as disaster recovery. There are many other established firms in this space, so it is not clear how easy or difficult it will be for VMware to leverage its position but it is a vendor worth watching in this space.

How much time does your company invest in it disaster recovery plans? How confident are you in their capabilities? How interested do have in VMware and its approach?