LeftHand Supports VMware Site Recovery Manager

LeftHand Networks, provider of highly available iSCSI SANs, announced its support for VMware Site Recovery Manager. VMware Site Recovery Manager is a pioneering new product for disaster recovery management and automation. Part of VMware’s industry-leading suite of management and automation products for the data center, VMware Site Recovery Manager simplifies business continuity planning and testing, and reduces the risk and complexity associated with implementing disaster recovery. LeftHand Networks’ certified Storage Replication Adapter allows customers to deploy a complete disaster recovery (DR) solution that automates DR for systems and storage across virtualized environments.

"VMware and LeftHand Networks are making disaster recovery rapid, reliable and affordable," said Parag Patel, vice president, alliances, VMware. "With the interoperability between LeftHand’s storage solutions and VMware Site Recovery Manager, customers can automate the testing and recovery of both applications and data recovery within VMware virtualized environments."

Organizations are increasingly faced with stringent recovery time objectives, success rate objectives and compliance requirements, all while continually seeking reliable and innovative disaster recovery solutions that can keep pace with the business expectations placed on IT organizations. LeftHand Networks’ SAN systems equipped with the Storage Replication Adapter and combined with VMware Site Recovery Manager provide customers with an integrated and completely automated disaster recovery solution. The combined recovery solution leverages the competitive advantages of LeftHand Networks’ Remote Copy capability, including:

• Capacity-efficient remote copies of the data that increase the speed of recovery and maximize the utilization of the SAN. LeftHand Networks’ Remote Copy leverages Advanced Thin Provisioning so that no excess reserve capacity is required in the disaster recovery site.
• Optimal usage of network / WAN resources for predictable quality of service and performance. LeftHand’s Remote Copy includes bandwidth throttling so that shared WAN resources are used optimally for the replication of data while not adversely impacting other traffic on the WAN.
• Fast and easy failover and failback of the data in the event of a disaster. LeftHand Networks’ Remote Copy includes incremental failover and failback capabilities managed via a simple Wizard interface. Unlike many storage vendors, once the primary data center is restored, failback of the data only requires the transfer of the incremental changes that occur subsequent to the original failure event.

"The LeftHand Networks Storage Replication Adapter combined with VMware Site Recovery Manager provides an excellent and simplified DR solution for customers, allowing them to recover virtual machines and storage with a single push of a button," said Mike Laverick of RTFM Education. "Certified solutions are important to customers, and I am delighted that LeftHand’s Storage Replication Adapter is certified for VMware Site Recovery Manager. With this certification, customers can enjoy the unique benefits of LeftHand’s Remote Copy with the added assurance of full compatibility and support when using VMware Site Recovery Manager."

By providing a single adapter that is compatible with its entire family of SAN solutions – including iSCSI SANs and Virtual SAN Appliances (VSAs) – LeftHand Networks simplifies disaster recovery for customers with virtualized environments. With its block-based Remote Copy replication architecture, the LeftHand iSCSI SAN works seamlessly with VMware Site Recovery Manager, providing performance, security and recovery advantages for virtualized applications running in customer environments.

"LeftHand is dedicated to delivering best-of-breed data protection, disaster recovery and high availability solutions in virtualized server and storage environments," said Larry Cormier, vice president of marketing, LeftHand Networks. "That’s why our storage systems come built-in with synchronous and asynchronous copy capabilities as well as advanced features such as thin provisioning for space efficient snapshots and automated failover and failback. Combined with VMware Site Recovery Manager, those features mean faster, more transparent recovery in an easier-to-use package."

Availability
The LeftHand Networks Storage Replication Adapter is available as a free download from LeftHand Networks’ and VMware’s websites beginning May 31, 2008. A single LeftHand Networks Storage Replication Adapter is compatible across LeftHand Networks’ entire suite of iSCSI SAN solutions.