Hostway Virtual Machine Replication Built for Windows Server 2012

The service allows IT departments to perform cross-site replication of VMs from one Windows Server Hyper-V host to another.

Cloud services provider Hostway announced the beta launch of its virtual machine replication service, designed to provide disaster recovery on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. The service is enabled by the Hyper-V Replica feature included in Microsoft's recently released Windows Server 2012 operating system. The service and other components of Windows Server 2012 are available as an add-on for customers currently using or purchasing a Hostway FlexCloud Server virtual machine, with onboarding, process and access support for the replication and DR service provided by the FlexCloud Server support team.

Aimed at small and midsize businesses (SMBs) the service allows IT departments to perform cross-site replication of VMs from one on-premise Windows Server Hyper-V host to another – for example, from an in-house office location to the Hostway cloud. They can also deploy geographically dispersed disaster recovery with site-to-site replication of VMs from one Hostway datacenter to another in real-time. In addition, Hyper-V Replica is application-agnostic, storage-agnostic, and offers support for legacy systems.

"Hostway's multiple, geographically dispersed datacenters enable customers worldwide to take full advantage of the new Hyper-V Replica capability in Windows Server 2012," Ian Carlson, director of product marketing for server and tools at Microsoft, said in a prepared statement. By giving customers a solution based on Hyper-V Replica, Hostway gives customers a robust, affordable and easy-to-manage VM disaster recovery solution."

In addition to Hyper-V Replica, Hostway is also offering the full Windows Server 2012, with features including cloud-optimized capabilities for mission-critical applications and website hosting, enhanced support for open standards and open-source applications, a multi-machine management environment, and secure storage with automatic failover protection to eliminate blackouts, service interruption and lost data.

"With more companies moving mission-critical data to VMs, it's more important than ever for them to have a failsafe in place and create virtual machine redundancy across data centers to guarantee 100 percent application availability," Aaron Hollobaugh, vice president of marketing and communications for Hostway, said in a prepared statement. "Windows Server 2012 addresses some of our customers' important concerns, because it not only makes it easier to store and manage all this virtual data, it enables companies to easily set up replication and failover to ensure business continuity."

Despite the fact that system downtime costs an average of $75,000 per day for businesses that are unprepared for failure and lacking a robust disaster recovery plan, a 2011 Symantec SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey found half of the SMB respondents surveyed said their company had no DR plan in place. Moreover, the report noted financial losses could be compounded by the fact that these costly outages happen an average of six times per year.