No matter how you look at it, backup is a necessary evil that most organizations would rather be able to live without. A lot of organizations have been doing just that by replicating data between servers. The challenge has been that many of the services that provide that capability in the cloud are too expensive to be generally used for every application environment.
HotLink, a provider of management tools for hybrid virtual machine environments, today released a tool that allows IT organizations to sharply reduce the cost of replicating and recovering VMware application workloads by employing Amazon Web Services (AWS).
According to HotLink CEO Lynn LeBlanc, rather than just backing up instances of VMware, HotLink DR Express allows organizations running VMware vSphere to treat AWS as a natural extension of their existing IT environment. In the event of a disaster, rather than taking a lot of time to recover a particular workload, HotLink DR Express allows that workload running on AWS to be accessed in a couple of minutes.
While the notion of using replication in the cloud to drive business continuity is not that new, HotLink is allowing VMware shops to take advantage of inexpensive compute cycles on AWS using the HotLink Transformation Engine versus requiring them to work with a cloud provider that is also running VMware virtual machines.
At a time when VMware has finally begun aggressively pushing cloud services based on its architecture, HotLink DR Express gives IT organizations the option to leverage AWS for disaster recovery, while relying on cloud services that run VMware for production applications.
Naturally, that may not be exactly what VMware would prefer to see happen. But in terms of providing an affordable replication option in the cloud, AWS is going to be pretty tough to beat.
