SunGard Availability Services announced Virtual Server Replication Services, an AdvancedRecovery solution for organizations using virtualization technology to run their business applications. The offering provides companies an affordable way to implement a comprehensive second site recovery program for virtual and physical IT environments, with failover within six hours.

This offering is part of the recently announced SunGard and VMware partnership, where the companies are working together to deliver a new breed of fully managed virtualization-based services giving companies more AdvancedRecovery options to help meet today's aggressive availability goals.

"We turned to virtualization because our data center faces a constant need to add more servers while also being limited by the physical space available without expensive expansion," said Mark Zwartz, manager of information technologies at JMB Companies. "While it took us one year to get our high availability site up and running, SunGard came in and had our virtual recovery site ready to go in three weeks for our mission-critical applications. This experience demonstrates the value companies looking at virtualized recovery solutions can gain by tapping SunGard's expertise rather than handling internally."

SunGard Virtual Server Replication Services leverages a shared virtual infrastructure fully managed at a SunGard data center. With the service, a customer replicates its existing virtual machine infrastructure and SunGard stores this virtual disk file, containing the guest virtual machine's server operating system, data and applications, in a dormant state.

"Server virtualization will dramatically change [the IT Recovery Services] model for both the services provider and the customer. With replication to a shared storage infrastructure and a virtualized server infrastructure, customers can enjoy improved recovery-time and recovery-point objectives without the cost of dedicated and custom recovery solutions from the DR service provider," said Stephanie Balaouras of Forrester Research.

When a customer activates failover, SunGard moves the virtual disk file to production mode at one of its highly secure data centers -- helping customers achieve a sub-six hour recovery time objective (RTO) which many businesses require to continue operations without significant impact to customers and employees. All aspects of replication and failover are monitored and managed by SunGard, and the six-hour recovery window is part of SunGard's standard service level agreement (SLA) for the service. The customer can then use its applications on a SunGard-provided virtualized IT infrastructure, which utilizes VMware virtualization, to run its production system. SunGard also manages replication back to the original source, once a customer's IT environment is ready to resume operations.

"The Achilles heel of most virtualized IT environments is that they rely on a single data center to facilitate system failover should an event occur," said Bob Parker, director of AdvancedRecovery product management at SunGard Availability Services. "A recovery strategy with no off-site data may mean, quite possibly, no recovery. Virtual Server Replication Services provides organizations an affordable way to have access to a secondary data center for protection of physical and virtual IT environments."