Building on its cloud computing management offering for enterprises, RackWare Inc. released version 5.0 of its flagship RackWare Management Module (RMM).

The new features make it easier for companies to scale across private, public or hybrid cloud environments and more cost-efficiently, said Todd Matters, the chief architect for RackWare.

Key to that is the merging of its disaster recovery and backup technology. By combining the two and providing a backup wizard, the company says it eliminates waste and streamlines the process.

“With RMM 5.0, we have complemented our robust disaster recovery features with backup,” said Sash Sunkara, CEO of RackWare in a news release. “Historically, there was disaster recovery and there was backup, and they were separate installations. Disaster recovery was very expensive and hardware focused. With cloud technology, we’re able to merge backup and disaster recovery technology. Disaster recovery no longer has to be hardware-centric and can be merged with your backup strategy.”

The backup wizard includes policy configuration on top of a disaster recovery policy. Users can configure two sets of recovery points: short-term and long-term.

Other new features found in RMM 5.0 include the following:

• The ability to whitelist and blacklist drives: This allows flexible support for networked storage and the ability to mark networked drives as whitelist or blacklist and selectively include them for migration to the cloud.

• Single file restore

• Auto provisioning for VMware vSphere and VMware vCloud Director

• Auto provisioning for OpenStack

• Disaster recovery policy integration with Oracle Corp.’s Data Guard

“This is part of a comprehensive roadmap we’re rolling out to provide automated functionality to the major use cases we support: replication and migration, disaster recovery, backup, and auto-scaling,” Matters said.

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