Clients expect an “always-on” environment

Disaster recovery (DR) service has become a necessity as downtime due to ransomware, cyber-attacks, natural disasters, and system failures has become more ubiquitous. These incidents and events can impact your business outcomes at any time or even endanger your livelihood.

With the average cost of downtime getting higher every year, clients are looking to stay always-on and maintain uptime while keeping the total cost of ownership as low as possible. Clients also want to utilize their existing infrastructure and tooling without refactoring the applications and workloads.

Cost-efficient disaster recovery service based on a consumption model

Today, IBM Cloud is excited to announce the limited availability of VMware vCloud Availability for vCloud Director, a disaster recovery solution based on a consumption model that reduces costs significantly and allows you to utilize familiar VMware tooling.

Traditional DR solutions require IT to create a mirror image of an existing system, which is overkill and often unaffordable. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provides IT with a highly cost-effective solution that supports the replication, failover, and failback of on-premises vSphere VMs to a vCloud environment on IBM Cloud infrastructure.

Consumption model of your choice

vCloud Availability for vCloud Director allows clients to select from two consumption models:

• Pay-As-You-Go allows clients to pay only for vCloud Availability license and storage consumed for disaster recovery scenarios. Clients can start with a minimal footprint and cost and keep the ability to scale up and consume compute when disasters strike.

• Reserved Capacity provides a dedicated resource pool, including guaranteed compute capacity.

Existing VMware infrastructure and tooling

vCloud Availability leverages existing VMware infrastructure and tooling on the on-premise. This enables clients to failover workloads to the cloud from their existing native VMware environment. Clients can enjoy the benefits of the public cloud—scalability, speed, and cost-effectiveness—without refactoring their applications and workloads. In addition, vCloud Availability significantly reduces the learning curve by using many of the tools that VMware users have been consuming for years, namely vSphere replication.

Strong recovery point objective and point-in-time copies

vCloud Availability offers a strong recovery point objective of five minutes, which is perfect to protect tier 2 and tier 3 applications. Clients can also save up to 24 point-in-time copies or snapshots to be used later as seeds to greatly reduce the recovery time in case of DR events.

Invest smartly in disaster recovery today

VMware vCloud Availability on IBM Cloud is available in a limited availability edition. Contact Rajeev Saxena, Offering Manager at IBM Cloud, to discuss your cloud-based disaster recovery strategy today. In the future, this solution will be available through the self-service IBM Cloud catalog.