VMware announces Site Recovery Manager

The biggest application for virtualization is definitively in disaster recovery. And this is why virtualization vendors like PlateSpin are pushing the concept since a long time already.

virtualization.info broke the news last month that VMware is ready to conquer this market as well with a new product.

Now VMware officially confirms its efforts announcing the new Site Recovery Manager (SRM):

VMware, Inc., the virtualization leader, today announced VMware Site Recovery Manager, a pioneering new product for disaster recovery automation.

VMware Site Recovery Manager is designed to simplify and automate the disaster recovery process so that customers can reliably recover from data center outages in hours rather than days. Working with VMware Infrastructure, VMware Site Recovery Manager can help eliminate the complexity and unreliability of manual recovery and also eliminate the cost and complexity of maintaining duplicate but idle infrastructure at a recovery site.

VMware and its storage partners including EMC, EqualLogic, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, Lefthand Networks and Network Appliance are working to support the use of leading storage replication capabilities with VMware Site Recovery Manager…

VMware stays pretty mum about this products architecture and features until tomorrow, when VMworld 2007 will start, but first partner to announce support for this solution, Emulex, reveals some details:

Currently, data centers using VMware Infrastructure and EqualLogic’s virtualized SAN solution benefit from consolidation, flexibility and simplicity that provide advantages for disaster recovery operations. Now, EqualLogic is working with VMware to enable VMware Site Recovery Manager to support and seamlessly leverage PS Series Auto-Replication. As a result of this effort, joint customers are expected to be able to automate critical recovery processes and test full recovery of VMware Infrastructure environments that have been replicated between two EqualLogic SANs with minimal impact on production services…

virtualization.info will blog live from the stage during all three days keynotes to tell more about this new product and others VMware will announce.