Datrium, the multicloud data platform vendor, has unveiled a new disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) offering which provides fully automated failover and backup from on-premises infrastructure to VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The Datrium DRaaS service, which is built on the company’s ControlShift workload orchestrator, provides the fully automated failover to the VMware Cloud on AWS using snapshots held in AWS S3 storage, Datrium said. Datrium provides single-point service ordering, billing and support with the service, instead of requiring customers to manage their AWS and VMware Cloud on AWS accounts directly.

The Datrium DRaaS runs on the secure, multicloud Datrium Automatrix data platform, which converges primary storage, backup, disaster recovery, encryption and data mobility capabilities into a single platform for users, eliminating complexity and management compared to maintaining at least five separate products. The service allows users to store incremental, native backups in AWS S3 using Datrium storage more easily and forever, according to the company.

In addition, Datrium DRaaS offers a 30-minute recovery compliance objective (RCO) with autonomous compliance checks and just-in-time creation of DRaaS VMware software-defined data centers and recovery point objectives (RPO) starting at five minutes, while supporting primary and backup data simultaneously.

Datrium DRaaS supports recovery to AWS regions including Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (London) and the eastern and western United States.

Mike Piltoff, senior vice president for Boca Raton, Florida-based reseller, Champion Solutions Group, told Channel Futures that the new one-click DRaaS service for VMware Cloud on AWS will give customers an affordable alternative for disaster recovery because they will only have to pay for it when they need it.

“We talk to many customers who cannot afford the high cost of dedicated disaster recovery sites,” said Piltoff. “This is a game changer for our customers. Datrium DRaaS is very low maintenance for us and expands our horizons with a new data management service with a very attractive ROI.”

Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said the new Datrium service is significantly different from alternatives because it brings true disaster recovery capabilities to VMware instances on AWS.

“There are a zillion VMware instances and all of them would love to have legit DR capabilities,” he said. “I don’t know any other way to do this without completely locking down every aspect of the app, operating system, virtual machine and all of the necessary infrastructure.”

Duplessie said the new service will be helpful for the channel.

“They are already brutally marginalized when it comes to selling commodity products and DR has always been brain surgery. This could be a boon for channel partners with services chops.”

Datrium’s Brian Biles

Brian Biles, Datrium’s chief product officer and co-founder, said requests for such a service inspired its development and introduction.

“Customer and partner demand motivated this product as well as the growing threats that organizations face from ransomware and natural disasters,” he said. “With our unique capability to recover from recent snapshots or old backups, Datrium is uniquely positioned to help organizations reduce the risk of ransomware attacks.”

The service aims to help reduce the complexity of providing true disaster recovery capabilities for businesses of all sizes, while removing the frustrations of previous systems, he said.

“Most businesses need an IT DR plan, but most of them can’t prove their plan will work,” said Biles. “The plans are so failure-prone, work-intensive and often capital-intensive that many IT groups just give up and hope they never face a data center outage.”