PHD Virtual Technologies, a pioneer in virtual backup, infrastructure monitoring and innovator of disaster recovery assurance solutions, announced today the newest product in their award-winning line, ReliableDR 3.1, a disaster recovery assurance solution for businesses with virtualized and cloud environments.

As part of the VirtualSharp acquisition earlier this month, PHD Virtual has immediately begun the process of extending the capabilities and customer value with the delivery of ReliableDR release 3.1. ReliableDR dramatically reduces the cost of IT disaster recovery testing to support increasingly aggressive recovery service level agreements demanded by businesses and compliance auditors. Unlike legacy DR tests, which are typically performed once per year, ReliableDR enables disaster recovery (DR) exercises to be performed on a daily, or even hourly, basis. ReliableDR not only enforces Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) / Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), but actually delivers Recovery Time Actuals (RTA) and automatically detects stale snapshots that are outside the RPO policy.

ReliableDR 3.1 upgrades include:

• vCloud Director Integration: VMware vCloud Director provides multi-tenant Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) capabilities to allow many customers, or tenants, to run on the same virtual infrastructure in a secure, self-service manner with specific operational policies applied to each tenant. Without vCloud Director integration, the admin must take several extra manual steps to complete recovery. Integrating into vCloud Director allows the recovery process to automate those final steps to ensure that existing Certified Recovery Points are imported automatically into the appropriate vCloud Director organization during failover to ensure fastest RTA for the application of the corresponding cloud policy for each tenant.
  

• Always-on VMs (Continuous Dependencies): Always-on VM technology helps users achieve fastest RTAs, automate granular service compliance when multiple services share the same application components, and improve the utilization of DR resources by turning them into an isolated test environment leveraging real production data. This feature allows applications to be DR tested separately while reusing the same base services like domain controllers and databases. With the VMs remaining powered-on, users can test multiple services that use common VMs, as well as failover more quickly because the boot sequence is eliminated from the recovery process.
  

• Advanced Reporting: How the data is reported is critical to saving time and mitigating compliance risk. ReliableDR 3.1 greatly enhances existing reporting capabilities by automatically sending report information to key stakeholders without administration intervention. Additionally, those stakeholders now have access to robust, customizable, historical analysis reporting without the administrators spending countless hours producing reports. In addition, an Excel plug-in to historical DR test data and runbooks is available to produce ad hoc reports. This is crucial for clients in the financial, healthcare and government sectors that have strict compliance requirements.
  

• User and Stakeholder Auditing: PHD's ReliableDR 3.1 extends disaster recovery compliance monitoring to end users and other BC/DR stakeholders like auditors and compliance officers so activity can be monitored without requiring specialized IT staff involvement, which will appeal to highly regulated sectors with multiple stakeholders stringent requirements for auditing and reporting.
  

• Web-oriented Architecture: ReliableDR 3.1 can be embedded into the customers' own management portal to improve branded service and provide a streamlined user experience within a centralized management framework. As a web application, ReliableDR can be driven and queried from other applications. For instance:
• o An application performance dashboard can obtain DR compliance information from ReliableDR, and present it in a single pane of glass;
• o An application delivery process can include a call to ReliableDR to automatically create a recovery specification when the application is moved to production.

"Adding the ReliableDR product to the PHD Virtual family of products is a winner for our customers and partners seeking recovery assurance that is so critical to disaster recovery planning," said Joe Noonan, Senior Product Manager, PHD Virtual. "This new release of the product provides even more automation and reporting capabilities to administrators running virtualized and cloud environments to guarantee their applications and business services will recover as seamlessly as possible to ensure business continuity."

"Our vibrant Technology Alliance Provider (TAP) community continues to innovate and bring new solutions to customers that can accelerate the transition to hybrid cloud environments," said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. "We are pleased to see PHD Virtual announce support for automated failover-to-vCloud Director, in what becomes another proof point of the sustainability and flexibility that VMware vSphere provides our customers."