Hostway, a provider of cloud and managed hosting, as well as hybrid cloud services, has initiated the beta launch of its new virtual machine (VM) replication service, and one of the first VM replication services for disaster recovery (DR) on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. The service is enabled by the Hyper-V Replica feature included in the newly released Windows Server 2012 operating system.
Hostway’s new replication service leverages the company’s geographically dispersed data centers to provide a cloud-based DR solution that enables cross-site and site-to-site VM replication to support both planned and unplanned failover resolution. The service meets SOX, HIPAA, SEC, and other regulatory compliance requirements.
According to the 2011 Symantec SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, system downtime costs an average of $75,000 per day for businesses that are unprepared for failure and lack a robust disaster recovery plan. The loss is compounded by the frequency of outages—six times per year, according to the Symantec survey. Of even more concern, half of the SMB respondents surveyed say their organizations have no DR plan in place.
Hostway’s service enables SMBs to use the company’s public or private cloud infrastructures to establish a real-time, compliance-quality, reliable DR solution. Businesses can perform cross-site replication of VMs from one on-premise Windows Server Hyper-V host to another—for example, from an in-house office location to the Hostway cloud. Or, they can perform site-to-site replication of VMs from one Hostway data center to another. Hyper-V Replica is application-agnostic, supporting even legacy systems, and storage-agnostic, to support a variety of storage environments.
“With more companies moving mission-critical data to VMs, it’s more important than ever for them to have a failsafe in place and create virtual machine redundancy across data centers to guarantee 100 percent application availability,” says Aaron Hollobaugh, vice president of marketing and communications for Hostway. “Windows Server 2012 addresses some of our customers’ important concerns, because it not only makes it easier to store and manage all this virtual data, it enables companies to easily set up replication and failover to ensure business continuity.”
Earlier this year, Hostway became one of the few hosting partners selected by Microsoft to offer the release candidate version of Windows Server 2012 to customers for beta testing and feedback. With the official launch of Windows Server 2012, in addition to Hyper-V Replica, Hostway is now offering the full Windows Server 2012, with capabilities including:
- Cloud-optimized capabilities for mission-critical applications and website hosting, with increased website density and efficiency, scalability, and elasticity for multi-tenant applications, and enhanced support for open standards, open-source applications, and multiple development languages.
- Multi-machine management environment that provides a dashboard view of all servers and their roles for visibility and management.
- Continuous-availability, high-performance storage with automatic failover protection to eliminate blackouts, service interruption, and lost data.
“Hostway’s multiple, geographically dispersed datacenters enable customers worldwide to take full advantage of the new Hyper-V Replica capability in Windows Server 2012. By giving customers a solution based on Hyper-V Replica, Hostway [provides] a robust, affordable, and easy-to-manage VM disaster recovery solution,” says Ian Carlson, director of product marketing, server and tools, Microsoft.
The new Hyper-V Replica-enabled service and other components of Windows Server 2012 are available as an add-on for customers currently using or newly purchasing a Hostway FlexCloud Server virtual machine. For the time being, onboarding, process, and access support for the replication and DR service will be provided by Hostway’s FlexCloud Server support team. Upon the release of Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1 RTM, Hostway will offer the service as a customer-configurable and -manageable, production-ready solution backed by Hostway technical support.
