Symantec has announced that it will extend its Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows and Veritas Volume replicator Disaster Recovery (DR) software to the Windows Azure Cloud platform. Symantec’s solution will allow organizations of any size to recover business critical applications and their associated data in Windows Azure in the event of a local failure or site disaster. The solution will expand the ability of Symantec’s existing business continuity solutions for Microsoft, providing on-premise-to-Cloud Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
Organizations are increasingly demanding better protection and more recovery options, including leveraging the public Cloud for disaster recovery protection. According to IDC’s 2011 Business Continuity Market Analysis, “Advancements in replication, clustering and server virtualization software have opened the door to a more flexible approach to those architecting business continuity (BC) schemes. Given the increased need for business uptime and corporate reliance on information technology… the role of public Clouds within the BC market will surely increase.”
As organizations deal with downtime due to disasters, storage failures, network issues, maintenance or power outages, they need an off-premise solution that provides fast recovery to keep their applications and data available to users.
Symantec’s DRaaS solution with Windows Azure will go beyond today’s more common backup to and recovery from the Cloud offerings. Symantec’s award winning Storage Foundation High Availability and Veritas Volume Replicator high availability and disaster recovery technology will enable organizations to not just protect their data but protect their applications as well. With this solution, IT organizations will benefit by realizing vastly improved recovery time and recovery point objectives for business critical applications in the event of an on-premise outage. Not only will the solution ensure real-time replication of critical application data, but it will also provide end-to-end recovery coordination from the data all the way up through the application. IT organizations can avoid having to manage a DR site themselves and benefit from the Cloud services provided by Windows Azure.
Technology from Symantec’s market leading Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows and Veritas Volume Replicator products will form the basis for the solution. With this announcement, Symantec continues to expand its availability and disaster recovery interoperability with Microsoft solutions, which includes Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server Hyper-V, and now Windows Azure. More information on the new solution will be made available at a later date.
“Windows Azure is growing rapidly as a platform, and we are seeing many of our customers utilizing it as part of a new delivery model for computing resources,” said Deepak Mohan, Senior Vice President, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec. “With Symantec’s proven high availability technology, and Microsoft’s Cloud platform, organizations can rest assured that their business will keep running in cases of disasters and outages.”
