As 2021 kicks off, we want to share more about new enhancements delivered in VMware Cloud Disaster RecoveryTM in December, shortly before we all took well-deserved time-off to end 2020.
But before we get to that, let’s take a look at a few customer cases since VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery was first released in October. Overall, we’ve seen a lot of interest from mid-market and large customers alike. In one case, a life sciences and technology customer will use VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery to replace an out-of-state DR data center, and in the process reduce their TCO while lowering their RPO by 3-4x. Another customer, in the financial industry, will recover critical workloads in minutes versus their previous state of days or weeks to recover from a situation like ransomware, helping to meet compliance requirements in their regulated industry.
These are just two examples of why VMware customers are excited about VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. In our opinion, they reinforce analysts’ analysis that “infrastructure and operations leaders are increasingly looking to DRaaS for a variety of reasons, including faster implementation, increased business resiliency and a potential reduced cost of 30% to 50%.”[1]
Now on to the new enhancements, and how they provide easier on-demand DR, for more customers across the globe, for more of their business-critical applications, leveraging cloud economics in a more cost-efficient manner.
More supported regions. We launched in October 2020 in 9 VMware Cloud on AWS regions (4 in the US, Canada, London, Frankfurt, Sydney, and Singapore), and have now added 4 more (Ireland, Paris, Mumbai, Tokyo). Expect us to regularly add more regions based on where there is customer demand.
New option for data-intensive workloads. I3en hosts are now supported in Recovery SDDCs and can be used for recovery operations. With newer Intel Xeon Processors, more RAM, and more raw storage capacity, it offers the lowest price per GB of SSD instance storage.
Support for larger environments. Multiple vSphere clusters can now be part of the Recovery SDDC to increase recovery capacity per VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery instance so you can protect more of your production environment.
Faster failover and failback. VMs are now powered on in parallel batches that correlate with the number of recovery hosts. Failbacks can now leverage existing VM content on the destination site when incremental data transfer based on snapshot data is not possible.
Ease of use with vSphere tags support. Wildcard definitions of vSphere tags can now be used to dynamically associate VMs to protection groups and be included in snapshots. The recovery process also preserves tags on recovered VMs that were associated with those VMs on the original protected site.
And we are just getting started. With projections that by 2023, at least 50% of commodity-server workloads still hosted in the data center will use the public cloud for disaster recovery [2], you will see a continuous stream of new value delivered in VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery over the course of 2021. To check out roadmap items in active development as well as in the planning stage, go to the VMware Cloud on AWS roadmap page and filter by “Disaster Recovery.”
As new enhancements are GA’ed, we’ll share a summary here. In addition, we’ll share more details of how customers are using VMware DR solutions in their business operations resiliency plans. In the meantime, you can learn more about VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery by watching product videos and going through the hands-on lab.
[1] Gartner, “How to Determine if DRaaS Will Save Money”, Jeffrey Hewitt, Ron Blair, 29 September 2020
[2] Gartner, “Using Public Cloud to Reduce DR Costs”, Nik Simpson, December 2020
