
VMWare has released a product that they have titled “vCloud Hybrid Service – Disaster Recovery.” This solution is aimed at small to medium enterprises who are trying to come up with some sort of virtualized disaster recovery plan. In 2011, InformationWeek reported that 57% of small to medium enterprises have no disaster recovery plan. Although current research is unavailable, this staggering statistic shouldn’t have changed much in the past couple of years.
VMWare has simplified the disaster recovery process. Many small to medium businesses feel as if they aren’t mature enough as a company to even have a disaster recovery plan. Others feel like the process is too costly or perhaps they do not have an experienced technical engineer on site that can help navigate the process of instituting a disaster recovery service. VMWare’s vCloud Hybrid Service Disaster Recovery is aimed directly at this type of clientele. The DR services give entrepreneurs an easy and hassle free method of instituting a disaster relief plan without having to reallocate resources or spend a bundle in setting up off site hardware. The service simply replicates your virtual machines into the cloud automatically. If your office were to go down, you would have an up to date copy of all of your company’s latest data and server configurations.
Speaking of costs, VMWare says that it’s pricing starts at $835 per month. Some businesses may think that this is expensive. When you weigh that cost alongside the cost of rebuilding your business from the ground up due to a natural disaster, $835 per month seems like a nominal fee. The $835 per month fee provides 1TB of data backup, two 7 day DR tests and the ability to retrieve your DR site within 15 minutes. In times of uncertainty, it’s always better to be prepared than unprepared.
VMWare has datacenters inside of the United States and the United Kingdom. VMWare’s disaster recovery services will expand its outreach as the product begins to mature.