I have just been shown a demo by PHD Virtual of their latest version of ReliableDR, & the first thing I have noticed as the title stated that it is fully business SLAs focused. With the shift today to models like ITaas & IaaS where the availability of the full application from a business perspective is becoming more critical each day, more organizations will be looking for solutions that ensure they are meeting these SLAs. ReliableDR does a great job at this, as it does not only allow a user to configure protection groups based on your business SLAs from a Disaster recovery perspective, but will do the auditing of these SLAs (RPO/RTO) for you.

I have seen it mentioned that you can now test/audit your DR –  RPO/RTO on hourly basis, which I believe might be achievable for a few critical applications.  But, I believe the more realistic approach will be testing/auditing the majority of VMs in a large scale environment on daily/weekly basis. We need to give PHD Virtual credit for creating a solution that can automate the testing of your DR – RPO/RTO without any required user interaction after being setup. They are not just helping you cut the huge cost associated with the labor of carrying regular DR testing and all the long hours and downtime required for it, but they even provide detailed reporting on what SLAs you will be meeting & which ones you will fail to meet based on real testing data specific to your environment. This will provide you with two important advantages:

1. You will have a certified DR – Recovery Point, where you know that an application will work after a disaster strikes your datacenter
2. You have an audited Disaster Recover plan, where you can easily prove to your management/audit team that you are compliance with their DR – SLAs.

Another feature that was announced as a part of the latest version of ReliableDR that got me excited is VMware vCloud Director integration. You heard it right, now you can easily build a disaster recovery solution for your vCloud Director environment without much of scripting or manual intervention. For those who implemented VMware vCloud Director & are looking for an automated DR solution, ReliableDR is a good option to evaluate. It does not stop there, if you have only a virtualized environment today and you want to back it up or move it to a VMware based public cloud, ReliableDR can be the product you are looking for. Actually I might have a second post on what ReliableDR can offer in a vCloud environment after getting to test it in my vCloud Director lab, which is I am currently refreshing at the moment. I believe that would be of a great interest to the larger community.

Here are a few more key features of ReliableDR:

Automated, Continuous, Service-Oriented DR Testing – Maintains the integrity of you DR plan by being service / application centric, not data centric.  It takes a business-centric view of an application and its dependencies and then automates the verification of those applications as many as several times per day.  The typical DR plan is tested 1-2 times per year.  You can test several hundreds or thousands of times per year with ReliableDR!

Application-Aware Testing – Measuring of accurate Recovery Time Actuals (RTOs & RPOs).

Certified Recovery Points – Automatically storing multiple certified recovery points. You can specify how many based on your needs

Compliance Reporting –Demonstrates DR compliance to auditors. Actually it generates a detailed DR Compliance report, that will put a large smile on your auditor face. Further, it will help your business understand what numbers you can meet & which you need to work on.

Test, Failover, and Failback – Automation of failover and failback processes. Disaster Recovery testing will no longer require an army over the weekend with long over-time hours to complete. It can actually be completed on nightly/weekly basis as required without much of user interaction.

Flexible Replication Options – Integration with all major storage vendors, multiple software based replication solutions including PHD Virtual, and also includes its own zero-footprint software-based replication capabilities

vCloud Director Integration – While PHD Virtual is not promoting this feature enough in my opinion, I believe it is one of this product most sought after feature.

The below table demonstrate the different editions available, & yes there is a limited functionality free edition for smaller shops who can not afford it.

	Enterprise	Foundation	Free
RPO	Configurable	Configurable	48 hours
Heartbeat check	Yes	Yes	Yes
Application verification	Yes	No	No
Scalability	Unlimited	Unlimited	10 VMs
Recovery Jobs	Unlimited	Unlimited	1
Maintenance	Mandatory	Mandatory	None
Recovery Points	Unlimited	1	1

 

Check Out  the below two videos for more info on PHD Virtual ReliableDR:

 

For more information on PHD Virtual ReliableDR, you might want to visit:  http://www.phdvirtual.com/disaster-recovery-assurance

I am actually considering writing a post on how it work with vCloud Director, but I would like to see how much of interest that would have between my readers. If you think that will be of interest to your, then please leave a comment with what would you like me to cover in that.