Artisan Infrastructure, a specialist in cloud infrastructure, cloud management and business continuity solutions, announced enhancements to IT Continuity Engine (ITCE), including support for VMware vCenter Server.
The latest updates deliver business continuity for VMware vCenter Server, protecting virtual machine-based applications from downtime.
In addition, ITCE’s integration with VMware now provides a high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR) solution which supplements or replaces native VMware business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions.
“Many of our customers require that they are able to isolate the DR site periodically to be able to test their recovery plan,” Michael Wrightson, director of product management for business continuity solutions at Artisan Infrastructure, told eWEEK. “With Engine, you simply stop replication and after the isolation takes place, they can promote the DR copies to active status to perform the testing. Afterwards, these systems go back into passive mode. Once the site is visible, Engine automatically will resynchronize the passive nodes with the current data from the production active server.”
Artisan Infrastructure’s ITCE core technology was the foundational technology originally used to protect vCenter, and IT Continuity Engine advantages for VMware vCenter Server environments include the prevention of data loss by ensuring a near-zero recovery point objective (RPO).
The platform’s Application Management Framework (AMF) allows for monitoring continually of the virtual and physical hardware, available resources, application performance, service and network availability.
Any events that are not within the acceptable parameters can be automatically responded to.
Recovery actions include alerts, application and service recovery, failover to a passive clone, VM restart and the ability for VMware virtual machines to leverage VMotion, which enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another.
These are enacted automatically, with the result being a process locally that can detect and react to any type of outage.
“Failover to DR sites is as simple as pushing a button,” Wrightson noted. “This event is then fully orchestrated to recover the application services in an alternate datacenter.”
Additionally, ITCE allows for the complete orchestration of site failovers for critical applications and business services in the event of a site outage.
The solution also provides for seamless failback to the primary infrastructure once the original issue has been remediated.
“Everything is moving to the cloud so providing integrated continuity services along with IaaS services is not an option, but a necessity for all cloud based organizations,” Wrightson said. “We’ll also see the inclusion of different levels of protection that allows the users to define distinct SLAs based on their requirements that is driven by the cloud management platform.”