Over the last several years, the adoption of virtualization has expanded dramatically because of its long list of potential benefits from lowering infrastructure cost to increasing agility. In March 2011, analysts at Aberdeen found that more than 50 percent of all applications are now virtualized. As the use of virtualization has increased, it has created an entire market for virtualization aware products and services like VirtualSharp’s disaster recovery solutions for virtual datacenters.

This week the company revealed healthcare provider Vivum Care Group has replaced its disaster recovery (DR) software with VirtualSharp’s ReliableDR. ReliableDR is a solution that automates disaster recovery for applications hosted on VMware vSphere using NetApp storage. In healthcare, losing data can have life-and-death implications, so ensuring DR solutions function reliably, even in the event of a catastrophic disaster, is of the utmost importance. Vivum feels it has gained this assurance with VirtualSharp’s software.

ICT Service Delivery Manager at Vivium, Martin Bloem, said,

 “VirtualSharp verifies that the servers and applications are operational, and reports what the total time of the Disaster Recovery process would be. In case of an emergency, we can now bring back production systems with the simple push of a button.”

Even outside of healthcare, disaster recovery for VMware is a major concern and VirtualSharp is only one of many options that businesses have to replicate and restore their environment. Within the VMware family, organizations can use Site Recovery Manager (SRM) or Data Recovery. Data Recovery  is data level solution that cannot backup to tape. SRM is a site level solution that many customers feel is too complex – especially in organizations without a dedicated VMware administrator. VMware has traditionally targeted larger IT shops with SRM, which explains the complex configuration options, but may begin selling to smaller businesses. Expanding to this market will likely necessitate enhancements to SRM to make it more usable for customers without deep, very specialized VMware expertise.

Fortunately, there are several user friendly third-party options for disaster recovery in a virtualized environment like Veeam’s Backup and Replication and Zerto’s BC/DR. Organizations that implemented disaster recovery before virtualization should consider reevaluating their selection. Virtualization can make disaster recovery more complex. It is important to choose tools that can support this more dynamic environment.