Virtual backup, infrastructure monitoring, and disaster recovery solutions provider PHD Virtual Technologies recently announced its latest disaster recovery assurance solution for businesses with virtualized and cloud environments called ReliableDR 3.1.

CJ Arlotta, Associate Editor

May 1, 2013

3 Min Read
PHD Virtual Technologies Sr Product Manager Joe Noonan said ReliableDR 31 reduces the cost of IT recovery testing through automation
PHD Virtual Technologies Sr. Product Manager Joe Noonan said ReliableDR 3.1 reduces the cost of IT recovery testing through automation.

Virtual backup, infrastructure monitoring, and disaster recovery platform provider PHD Virtual Technologies recently announced its latest disaster recovery assurance solution for businesses with virtualized and cloud environments called ReliableDR 3.1. The updated solution includes an integration for VMware (NYSE: VMW ) vCloud Director to provide multi-tenant infrastructure as a service (IaaS) capabilities. What's included in this upgrade? We'll reveal the newest features, along with a company outlook.

According to the company, this updated solution reduces the cost of IT recovery test through its levels of automation. PHD Virtual Technologies Sr. Product Manager Joe Noonan (pictured) said the solution automates application and network dependencies and application level service and transaction verification, along with the basic boot process.

"This allows us to test very frequently, a very important thing for business critical applications," he told MSPmentor in an email. "With the average DR test taking over $30k per test (according to Gartner (NYSE: IT), and the typical number of tests per year ranging from one to two, ReliableDR creates a paradigm shift of allowing users to test thousands of times per year and driving the cost per test down several orders of magnitude."

According to the company, ReliableDR 3.1 includes the following features:

  • vCloud Director Integration — Without vCloud Director integration, the admin must take several extra manual steps to complete recovery. Integrating into vCloud Director allows the recovery process to automate those final steps to ensure that existing Certified Recovery Points are imported automatically into the appropriate vCloud Director organization during failover to ensure fastest RTA for the application of the corresponding cloud policy for each tenant;

  • Always-on VMs — Always-on VM technology helps users achieve fastest RTAs, automate granular service compliance when multiple services share the same application components, and improve the utilization of DR resources by turning them into an isolated test environment leveraging real production data. This feature allows applications to be DR tested separately while reusing the same base services like domain controllers and databases. With the VMs remaining powered-on, users can test multiple services that use common VMs, as well as failover more quickly because the boot sequence is eliminated from the recovery process;

  • Advanced reporting —  How the data is reported is critical to saving time and mitigating compliance risk. ReliableDR 3.1 greatly enhances existing reporting capabilities by automatically sending report information to key stakeholders without administration intervention. Additionally, those stakeholders now have access to customizable, historical analysis reporting without the administrators spending hours producing reports. In addition, an Excel plug-in to historical DR test data and runbooks is available to produce ad hoc reports. This is crucial for clients in the financial, healthcare and government sectors that have strict compliance requirements;

  • User and stakeholder auditing — PHD’s ReliableDR 3.1 extends disaster recovery compliance monitoring to end users and other BC/DR stakeholders like auditors and compliance officers so activity can be monitored without requiring specialized IT staff involvement, which will appeal to highly regulated sectors with multiple stakeholders stringent requirements for auditing and reporting; and

  • Web-oriented architecture — ReliableDR 3.1 can be embedded into the customers’ own management portal to improve branded service and provide a streamlined user experience within a centralized management framework. As a web application, ReliableDR can be driven and queried from other applications

Noonan said the company is positioned to grow in the future, but added that the execution must proceed properly.

"We will continue to serve small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) through our ease of use and affordability," he said. "We will also be enhancing the portfolio to better facilitate CloudDR in ways that instill confidence in the entire process through cloud storage integration, recovery automation and compliance reporting. Lastly, we intend to attack the mid-market and enterprise spaces by giving them a full-featured data protection and disaster recovery solution that represents a true paradigm shift in cost-effectiveness and confidence."

About the Author(s)

CJ Arlotta

Associate Editor, Nine Lives Media, a division of Penton Media

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