Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is one of the most mature products in the VMware portfolio. It was first released in 2008 and, at one point in time, it was the second highest selling VMware product behind vSphere. Seriously. The reason for this resounding success is that SRM is a solution that embodies the value proposition of virtualization, providing automation and flexibility – automation to migrate or recover applications at scale, and flexibility to manage any vSphere virtualized application, using almost any type of storage infrastructure.
But saying SRM is mature doesn’t mean it is old. Like a nice wine, it means it gets better with time. It means it is seasoned, feature-rich and battle-tested by tens of thousands of customers. With the introduction of SRM 6.1 this past September, we reached the ninth release in SRM history. That comes to about 1.3 releases per year. That’s faster than the competition.
For those of you who haven’t heard, here’s a short summary of the latest and greatest. First, we added Storage Policy Protection Groups, a feature that allows you to automate the process of adding and removing SRM protection within the natural VM provisioning mechanisms of vSphere. Second, SRM 6.1 integrates with VMware NSX 6.2, letting you take advantage of network virtualization in order to automate the mapping and recovery of networking and security settings across sites. Finally, we added support for stretched storage solutions from our partner ecosystem. This new architecture allows you to run active-active data centers on a new range of supported replication solutions and to orchestrate zero downtime migrations at scale using cross-vCenter vMotion. You can read more about in the blog SRM 6.1 What’s New.
As you can tell, 6.1 continues down the path of adding automation and flexibility to your SRM implementation. Now let me emphasize the flexibility angle even further. As you may know, SRM integrates with an underlying replication solution, either VMware’s own vSphere Replication or array-based replication solutions offered by our storage partner ecosystem. However, did you know that in the past two years we have added support for many of the newer storage players, such as Nimble Storage, Pure Storage, Tintri, SolidFire and Infinidat? This, in addition to the partners we have supported since the beginning, such as EMC, NetApp, HP, IBM, Dell and others. Today, we have more than 20 different storage vendors in our Compatibility Guide. SRM may be a veteran, but it is certainly staying fresh with the innovation VMware is driving and with the help from all the partners that support it.
I could keep going on and on about why I think SRM is the best disaster recovery software since sliced bread, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Instead, take the word of your peers. Hundreds of them that have chosen SRM as the Best Business Continuity Product for the fourth year in row, as reflected in the Virtualization Review 2015 Readers Choice Awards. Here’s to many more years of success!
