11:11 Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) vs. VMware Site Recovery (DRaaS)

Sungard seems to be well-suited for those companies still doing traditional disaster recovery - replicating data (or shipping tapes), building out the servers/mainframe/AS400, restoring data/databases, then loading the applications and testing. We have limited exposure to their cloud offerings. For the most part, they can also take on or assist in the initial builds of client environments - we used them for building the OS only.

Incentivized

VMware Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery tools are well suited for customers who are heavily integrated with vSphere and VMs for their on-premises data centers today. VMware Cloud on AWS is great for customers who do not have DR sites and want to leverage the public cloud to build a DR site on demand quickly.

Incentivized

• Sungard does a good job dispersing risk. Even though the equipment we subscribe to is also subscribed by many other companies, they do a good job spreading those subscriptions across multiple industries and geographies, so that it is highly likely they'd have the equipment you'd need in the event of declaring a disaster
• Sungard has also done a good job working with us to break out costs, so that we are able to allocate our invoices amongst multiple products and clients.
• Sungard does a good job with security - physical security in the facilities, ensuring our interactions with them through their help desk or portal are secure, maintaining good access control, and providing us with options for ensuring our data is encrypted during testing activities

Incentivized

• Integration with VMware environments
• Simple to use for current VMware admins

Incentivized

• Some facilities are located in inner-cities - while easily accessible by everyone, sometimes environment leaves something to be desired.
• Limited expertise in Solaris (Sun) regarding their managed services offerings.
• Often times a laborious process to engage someone to do hands/feet work.

Incentivized

• vSphere replication not as feature rich as storage replication
• Third party software necessary if looking into public cloud

Incentivized

VMware support is typically outstanding, of course, they have multiple departments, and you need to work with the specific teams to get advanced support for things specific to VMware Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery. In contrast, other companies that deal directly with that technology may be more responsive to those specifics. Typically VMware is excellent and helpful in critical outages. For smaller to medium issues, it can take some time to get addressed appropriately.

Incentivized

I had used IBM Disaster Recovery Services in a previous job. While I found IBM much quicker to work with in terms of updating our equipment reservations, I've found Sungard much easier to conduct testing with. Specifically, they are much more adaptable and client-focused.

Incentivized

VMware is software and typically hardware agnostic, this does require extra design and consideration versus putting in backup appliances. Some other solutions are a software as well and can be layered on top of vSphere to enhance existing environments. We need to weigh the benefits of licensing versus software costs and the management cost of having multiple tools.

Incentivized

• ROI is a difficult concept regarding BCP or DR, since most dollars spent towards this are simply regarded as 'insurance' rather than an investment.
• Our ability to test and share those results with many of our clients is probably the biggest non-monetary return on investment we get.

Incentivized

• Requires running vSphere at target DR sites
• Potential licensing cost for cold/standby locations

Incentivized