VMware Site Recovery Manager Setup Gets Disaster Recovery Help from Pivot3

Pivot3 is making its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology interoperable with VMware’s latest Site Recovery Manager 8.2 (SRM) application to make it easier for VMware users to keep their primary, duplicated disaster recovery data backed up and available for instant use in an emergency.

One of the top use cases today for HCI is disaster recovery, and the new Pivot3 storage replication adapter (SRA) that has just been released to integrate HCI more easily with VMware SRM is designed to simplify the process for VMware customers, Mike Koponen, Pivot3’s senior director of product and solutions marketing, told Channel Futures.

In the past, VMware’s SRM data recovery application could be difficult for customers to connect with primary backup data in a data disaster recovery site using existing VMware tools, but the Pivot3 adapter allows VMware’s SRM to more easily talk to Pivot3’s replications technology, said Koponen.

Pivot3’s Mike Koponen

“We put capabilities into our hyperconverged software that enables our hyperconverged software platform to work with this new version of VMware’s SRM disaster recovery software,” he said. “For disaster recovery to work properly, data replication is a foundational piece of that process.”

“VMware is constantly trying to simplify how customers can set up their disaster recovery capabilities and it all needs to work seamlessly with the underlying data replication technology for it to be simple,” he said. “For disaster recovery replication to work properly, you have to be able to get the data from point A to point B.”

In this case, for VMware SRM, Pivot3’s adapter is used to bridge the connection and interface with the VMware application, said Koponen.

“VMware has simplified some things on their side for the customer, and then we in turn needed to do our part and do a new storage replication adapter” to finish the job, he said. Pivot3 is a longtime VMware partner.

Pivot3’s HCI platform, called Acuity, performs asynchronous data replication to the disaster-recovery destination which can be located in a customer’s main data-center site, at another site or in the public cloud. This works with VMware’s disaster recovery application, providing automated failover for data and needed applications to the disaster recovery destination site.

“This reduces any manual effort required during failover, failback and network mapping,” he added.

The adapter code provided by Pivot3 allows the VMware disaster recovery application to work with Pivot3’s built-in data replication, which moves the data to the disaster recovery site and keeps that data up to date, he said. A major benefit of the adapter is that it can prevent or reduce downtime for customers in the event of a disaster by ensuring that the designed failover systems work as designed.

“It was harder previously to deploy VMware Site Recovery Manager for the customers,” said Koponen. “It gives customers a ready-to-go virtual appliance, which can be installed directly from VMware vCenter, which reduces layers of complexity associated with deploying Windows Server VMs. It is also done directly from VMware vCenter, where customers do all their VM management.”

All of this can be important for channel partners, said Koponen, because of the growing popularity of HCI for disaster recovery systems, which provide new business opportunities for partners in helping with the deployments.

“This announcement introduces a simpler way to deploy disaster recovery by using our HCI in conjunction with VMware’s latest site recovery manager,” he said. “We get to leverage a lot of the VMware software suite to help their channel partners help their customers.”

Pivot3’s HCI systems are all-in-one modular appliances that replace …

… traditional separate servers, data storage systems, storage networking, software and more, allowing customers to deploy their infrastructure in appliances that can be added on as needed. The systems are cheaper to bring in, easier to deploy and manage, and can simplify the operations of business IT systems for users, said Koponen. The Pivot3 HCI appliances run the VMware ESXi hypervisor, making them easy for customers to use within their VMware ecosystems, he added.

“VMware is the gorilla in the market; that’s why we did this, to make it easier for those customers,” said Koponen.

Pivot3 is an open HCI platform that works with disaster recovery applications from other vendors as well, including Zerto, CloudEndure and Veeam.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group, said the Pivot3 adaptor can make disaster recovery setup tasks simpler for channel partners, but that it may also make some partners redundant.

Enderle Group’s Rob Enderle

“Making tools like this vastly easier also tends to make them far more appropriate for firms that, as a result of them, can use them without partners,” he said. “It will certainly benefit VMware customers and channel partners can use this tool to enhance their services.”

For users, the adapter can help solve downtime issues in the event of a disaster that can disrupt a business, said Enderle.

“Ease of use advancements particularly for crisis like problems like outages tend to be received very favorably by end users as a result,” he said.

Another analyst, Charles King of Pund-IT, said that Pivot3’s integration with VMware’s latest SRM should provide significant benefits for companies that are using VMware across their data-center environments.

“That solution aims to enhance recovery speed and features, which are crucial points for businesses that depend on access to business critical applications and data,” said King. “With this announcement, Pivot3 is showing its intention to fully support VMware’s offerings and to ensure that its customers gain maximum benefits.”