Amazon has continuously pushed the cloud envelope since entering the scene in 2006, making a whopping 42 price cuts over the last eight years and rolling out 280 new products and features in 2013 alone. Today, Amazon boasts a dominant market position and the industry’s most expansive portfolio of cloud services. However, competitors still have plenty of white space with which to work.

When it comes to disaster recovery, for instance, Amazon doesn’t have much in the way of a cohesive offering that is genuinely appealing to CIOs. Amazon S3 is a reasonably priced object storage service that can be useful for keeping off-premise copies of non-critical files but that’s about it as far as backup goes. And Amazon Glacier, which is several times cheaper, is intended solely for archiving—that is, storing information that is rarely accessed and usually only kept around for compliance purposes. But it can take so long to retrieve files from the platform that, despite the potential cost savings, it’s simply not viable for holding active data that has to be readily available at a moment’s notice when a system goes offline.

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vCloud Hybrid Service – Disaster Recovery

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Backup vendors such as HotLink and SunGard are helping to plug some of the holes in Amazon’s portfolio, but the ecosystem has thus far merely produced band-aid solutions that fail to fully address the needs of enterprise customers. Enter VMware, which today is grabbing the opportunity to play the role of white knight with a new service that aims to take the hassle out of business continuously—at a fraction of the cost of traditional on-premise solutions.

The new offering, called VMware vCloud Hybrid Service – Disaster Recovery, is launching today, just a month after the debut of Horizon DaaS, a cloud-based desktop virtualization solution based on technology the firm obtained as part of the acquisition of Desktone last October. Both products are interoperable with existing deployments of the EMC subsidiary’s hypervisor—a major differentiator that gives it an actual fighting chance against Amazon.

As VMware cloud boss Bill Fathers recently explained in an interview with SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE cohosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, the ability to manage both on- and off-premise infrastructure from a single environment removes traditional barriers to entry for large enterprises. “Every enterprise client we speak to is already starting to experiment with public cloud, [and] they’ve always invested heavily with VMware to build private clouds, so the reality is clients are going to be living in a hybrid cloud environment,” Fathers said. “They want to get the best of both worlds and we’re very focused on making sure they can now get the best of both worlds by having a public cloud solution that is entirely compatible with their private clouds.”

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Features of the new service

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The new VMware vCloud Hybrid Service – Disaster Recovery service provides a recovery point objective (RPO) of up to 15 minutes according to which means users can restore data from a quarter of an hour before a failure event. The platform also features self-service asynchronous replication and failover and failback, making it easier for organizations to protect applications and eliminating the need to maintain duplicate infrastructure.

Starting at $835 per month, the new service is available immediately from all five of VMware’s cloud data centers (including its newest facility in the London suburb of Slough). For this price, you will receive one terabyte of storage, standby compute capacity, two seven-day disaster recovery tests and production-grade support. The company is also offering a seeding option that allows customers to back up data to an offline disk drive and ship it to the location of their choice (instead of transferring their information over the Web which can take some time).

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Watch theCUBE’s interview with VMware’s Bill Fathers in its entirety:

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Photo credit: EJP Photo via photopin cc

Video of Bill Fathers interview courtesy of theCUBE

Suzanne Kattau contributed to this story.