VMware DRaaS Announcements are a Good Thing!

Today, VMware announced enhancements to both its vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and vCloud Air Disaster Recovery. In both cases, VMware is essentially asking, “Why just BaaS when you can DRaaS?

Over the past three VMworld events:

  • In 2013, VMware was talking about vSphere Data Protection (VDP/VDPA).
  • In 2014, VMware discussed maturations and enhancements in VDP & VDPA, building upon technologies from VMware parent company EMC’s Avamar products.
  • By 2015, VDPA was simply ‘included’ in some vSphere suites … essentially saying that “backup” is simply part of a broader IT management strategy.

Coincidentally, Microsoft did a similar standalone launch of Data Protection Manager (DPM), innovation/evolution and eventually rolled it and the other components into Microsoft System Center.

While “backup” may now be included within the management portfolio for VMware, “Disaster Recovery” and in the bigger picture “Ensuring IT Availability” was part of the Day One news from VMworld 2015.

ESG is just wrapping research on business continuity and disaster recovery trends, with a special focus on disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) … where we see great alignment between virtualization (that makes servers encapsulated and portable) and cloud services (which provide economically viable and operationally reliable secondary sites), with the wonderful result (when combined with workflows and orchestration) being DRaaS being viable for organizations of all sizes.

Arguably, the best outcome of this announcement has nothing to do with the profitability or marketability of VMware’s own DRaaS offerings or underlying technologies. While there will be successes there, the bigger industry impact will be VMware educating organizations of all sizes that “YES, you can do BC/DR by embracing virtualization and leveraging the cloud.”

Secondary benefits of VMware’s investments and service offerings around BC/DR will also give VMware more firsthand experience in what virtualized environments need in order to be more resilient. As such, it may also inform the ESXi, vSphere, vCenter, vStorage, and NSX teams in order to collectively continue to enhance the underlying platforms and components for even better BC/DR. And since “a rising tide lifts all boats,” the industry as a whole gets better when companies like VMware (and Microsoft with DPM to AzureRecovery) address the issues themselves, and thereby enhance their respective ecosystems and partners’ products as well.

[Originally blogged via ESG’s Technical Optimist.com]

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