Datrium, the disaster recovery vendor, has enhanced the features of its Datrium DRaaS with VMware Cloud on AWS product with several new capabilities, including instant RTO restarts and the ability to extend RTO disaster recovery to any VMware vSphere environment.

The instant RTO (real time objective) restarts from Datrium backups on Amazon S3 and the new DraaS Connect feature that extends instant RTO DR to any vSphere environment will help Datrium partners provide a new breed of services to customers without requiring conversion to other virtual machine or cloud formats, according to the company. The services are available to VMware users on premises and in the cloud.

Datrium’s Brian Biles

For channel partners, the broadened features will provide new opportunities for additional professional services and expanded disaster recovery protections for customers, Brian Biles, Datrium’s chief product officer and co-founder, told Channel Futures.

“Channel partners can help customers virtually eliminate the need for physical DR infrastructure” through the company’s cloud-based, on-demand model, he said. “Customers only pay when disaster strikes or for testing. Continuous compliance checks help ensure DR plans will work when customers need them most.”

The enhancements have been added to help make DR easier for customers and partners, who have been dissatisfied with the state of DR for a long time, said Biles.

“They’ve been looking for an economical solution that delivers instant RTO for all their VMware workloads, both in the cloud and on premises.”

By using DR with instant RTO for their VMware workloads, customers and partners can use a pay-on-demand model in the cloud so they don’t have to deal with learning how to administer a new cloud environment when disaster strikes, said Biles.

“Organizations can instantly restart thousands of VMs from recent snapshots or backups stored in cost-effective S3 that are years old,” he said.

The new capabilities also allow channel partners to sell on-demand DR to any customer running VMware production workloads in the cloud or on premises and to sell services to help organizations design their DR runbooks and implement DR strategies, according to Biles.

“DRaaS also helps partners become a trusted advisor to clients and sell a robust DR SaaS offering in a market that’s suffered from ineffective solutions,” he said.

The additional features grew out of customer and partner feedback and additional development research.

“We saw an excellent opportunity to extend our capabilities beyond Datrium systems to address all VMware workloads,” he said. “We believe DR is the perfect use case for VMware Cloud with AWS, where elastic resources allow us to convert a very fragile, human-intensive process into an easy, one-click SaaS solution.”

Mike Piltoff, senior vice president for strategic marketing with Datrium partner, Champion Solutions Group, a Boca Raton, Florida-based reseller, said the bolstered DRaaS offerings will be helpful for a wide range of his clients.

Champion Solutions Group’s Mike Piltoff

“DR from an IT infrastructure standpoint really has been something that everybody knows they need and that everybody wants, but many clients have shied away from it because of the expense and complexity,” said Piltoff. “So, every year the burner gets turned up early in the year about DR,” but it later gets put on hold in deference to other needs. “As a result, in a lot of medium-sized businesses, DR has been shelved time and time again.”

The updated Datrium products could help change that, he said.

“This will help because of the cost of it — it’s a minimal investment” compared to installing a physical DR system. Using Datrium’s MSP model and a supplied run book template that can be customized for each client, Champion and other partners can give customers what they need and minimize their costs, said Piltoff.

“It’s all there, it’s simple and it’s lower cost,” he said. “And because of their tight integration with VMware, they are able to …

… perform flawlessly for customers,” with a minimal investment in AWS for customers. Customers are billed on a per day basis for the recovery and management services from Datrium, only when they are needed, he added.

“If you have a DR need and have to failover to another data center, it’s going to be one of the most hectic days of your life,” said Piltoff. “So, if you have an MSP who can handle that for you, it’s going to be terrific. Who wouldn’t buy automobile insurance if you only had to pay for it when you need it?”

For partners like Champion, anything that helps them help their clients to increase their IT productivity is useful, said Piltoff. The recurring revenue by providing the services is also a gain, even if clients choose DRaaS services over buying costly new hardware and software-based DR systems, he added.

“It could cannibalize revenue for us from more expense solutions we could sell,” said Piltoff. “We fully expect it to, and we endorse it.”

Steven Hill, an analyst with 451 Research, told Channel Futures that reducing RTO times using the latest Datrium features will be an extremely useful capability for protecting business-critical applications for customers and partners. The new features that can snapshot running applications and immediately spin up and recover applications directly from S3 object storage without any conversions will also be welcome, he said.

“In business continuity and disaster recovery, speed and efficiency are everything,” said Hill.

The tie-in with VMware systems is a savvy move for Datrium, he added.

“A massive number of important workloads currently run on VMWare, which represents a substantial potential market for channel partners and a powerful BC/DR option for their customers, especially when combined with the automation made possible by a hybrid cloud approach to infrastructure,” Hill said. “Instantaneous RTO can be an extremely powerful tool channel partners can adopt for protecting critical workloads, as both a service for their customers as well as for protecting their own production environments.