VMware Spices Up Its Public Cloud With New Disaster-Recovery-As-A-Service

VMware launched its long-awaited cloud disaster-recovery-as-a-service on Tuesday, the second product offering to go live on its public cloud in the space of a month.

The cloud disaster-recovery-as-a-service, which starts at $835 monthly for one TB of storage and 20 GB of RAM, continually backs up virtual machines running in VMware private clouds to the vCloud Hybrid Service public cloud. Customers can choose to have backups at intervals ranging from 15 minutes to 24 hours.

VMware is pitching the service as a cheaper way for its existing customers to protect mission-critical apps and data. It's also far simpler to set up and manage than existing disaster recovery products on the market, Mathew Lodge, vice president of cloud services at VMware, said in an interview prior to Tuesday's announcement.

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"Many customers want better protection, and a recovery point that is less than 24 hours, but only if it's at the right price point," Lodge said.

Lodge said VMware is targeting midsize organizations that want to avoid the cost of running separate data centers for disaster recovery purposes, as well as customers that are looking to expand the number of apps they're protecting in a business continuity plan.

Most enterprises use disaster recovery for a small number of mission-critical apps, such as transaction processing systems, but the low cost of the VMware service could enable them to protect a wider range of apps, Lodge said.

VMware partners can get additional services revenue from helping customers identify which apps they want to protect with the service. They also can run the service on their customers' behalf, Lodge said.

VMware's disaster-recovery-as-a-service also is simple enough for customers to install and manage it themselves, Lodge said.

VMware launched its public cloud last May to attract more enterprise customers and keep them away from Amazon Web Services. But until recently, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based vendor didn’t have any high-profile services running on its cloud.

After launching a cloud-based Desktop-as-a-Service offering last month, which costs $35 per user, per month, VMware now has two cloud services that could get enterprises' attention.

PUBLISHED APRIL 15, 2014