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Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and data availability specialist Veeam Software announced its Cloud Connect platform will be extended to include advanced image-based virtual machine (VM) replication capabilities as a part of the company’s Availability Suite 9, which will be generally available later this year.
Image-based VM replication through Cloud Connect includes built-in multitenant support to securely share host or cluster CPU, RAM, storage and networking resource allocation between different tenants.
Other features include full site failover to a service provider site with just a few clicks on a secure Web portal, including failover orchestration with failover plans, and partial failover to instantly switch over selected VMs only.
“To recover from a true natural disaster, like a hurricane, a tornado or an earthquake, IT needs an offsite facility with a replica of all critical applications and data in a ready-to-go state that can be used right away,” Doug Hazelman, vice president of product strategy at Veeam Software, told eWEEK. “And it needs to be located far enough away from the primary data center so any natural disaster wouldn’t take both out at the same time.”
Hazelman said setting up and maintaining a separate DR site is expensive and cumbersome, which is why cloud-based DRaaS presents such a compelling alternative.
“It’s an easy, less expensive way to get your data to an offsite facility that’s maintained by a trusted advisor, and it avoids the need to make a large capital investment,” he explained.
Other features include built-in network extension appliances to preserve communication with and between production VMs regardless of their location and failback to the existing or new infrastructure to restore normal business operations.
Rounding out the package is failover testing for seamless failover simulation without disrupting production workloads, single-port connectivity through a secure Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection to a service provider and multiple traffic reduction technologies including built-in wireless area network (WAN) acceleration, replica seeding and replication from a backup.
“We find that IT’s biggest concern with cloud is that others may have unauthorized access to sensitive data,” Hazelman said. “We address that concern by enabling our customers to encrypt their backups before they send data to the cloud using keys that they control. With backups, customers are often worried about sending data to the cloud because they feel they won’t have any idea of where their data is actually physically located.”
That’s one of the reasons Veeam has decided to work with its partners to enable them to provide cloud-based DRaaS instead of creating their own service, according to Hazelman.
“End users feel more comfortable sending their data to service providers they already know and trust from an established business relationship,” he said.