PHD Virtual Technologies, a pioneer in virtual backup and innovator of disaster recovery assurance solutions, announced today a free recovery time calculator to quickly and automatically calculate how long it will take to recover virtual machines and critical applications in the event of an outage or disaster.  Dubbed the RTA Calculator, for the ‘Recovery Time Actual' estimate it provides, PHD's free tool can be easily downloaded and then immediately provides visibility into what your organization's actual recovery time would be in the event of an outage.

Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) define and govern the amount of downtime that is tolerable for a given VM, group of VMs, or applications in the event of an outage. However, most organizations may not be sure whether it is possible to actually recover within these objectives and that presents a problem. With PHD's RTA Calculator an auto-generated report will illustrate just how long (in minutes or seconds) it would take to recover your virtual machines.

"The recovery of virtual machines and critical applications from the recovery of a single VM through full site restoration is still a risky proposition for most companies," said Joe Noonan, Senior Product Manager, PHD Virtual. "All too often data recovery or failover and failback don't perform as expected especially when the outage is real and recovery time is impacting your business. PHD's recovery tool is able to calculate an accurate recovery time actual to compare to your recovery time objectives and determine if you can adhere to your SLAs."

• Eliminates manual disaster recovery testing
• Produces the actual recovery time for a VM, or group of VMs, on VMware with minimal impact on your production environment
• Provides a fast and convenient way to estimate Recovery Time Objectives for Backup plans, Disaster Recovery plans, and SLA plans
• Enables periodic comparison of Recovery Time Actuals to Recovery Time Objectives
• Allows you to adjust your RTOs and SLAs over time as your environment grows and changes
• Can be run as often as required and under different production conditions, with any group of VMs to be estimated

The RTA Calculator requires no training or product documentation and is an efficient free tool and datacenter friendly. Before timing the cloned VMs, they are reconfigured to have no network connection to minimize production impact, and avoid duplicate IP addresses. Also, after the RTA Calculator produces the recovery time actual estimate, it cleans up after itself by deleting the linked clones, and restoring your environment back to its original state.