VMware has announced its new tool for disaster recovery management and automation of a virtual infrastructure. VMware Site Recovery Manager, part of VMware's suite of management and automation products for the datacenter, leverages virtualization to simplify business continuity planning and testing, and reduces the risk and complexity associated with executing disaster recovery. While traditional disaster recove VMware has announced its new tool for disaster recovery management and automation of a virtual infrastructure. VMware Site Recovery Manager, part of VMware’s suite of management and automation products for the datacenter, leverages virtualization to simplify business continuity planning and testing, and reduces the risk and complexity associated with executing disaster recovery. While traditional disaster recovery plans are laborious and time-consuming to set up and maintain, VMware SRM combined with virtualization technology makes the entire implementation of a recovery site a much more inexpensive and simplified process. Traditional non-virtualized systems have extensive dependencies on hardware configurations, which make consistent automation of the process extremely difficult if not impossible. Virtualization removes that dependency. And virtualization and SRM also allow the IT department to actually test the disaster recovery plan without downtime, something else that was previously determined impossible.“Effective disaster recovery has been a significant challenge for many organizations,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions at VMware. “With the delivery of VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware removes hurdles associated with disaster recovery planning and implementation. Through our innovative disaster recovery testing, management, and automation capabilities, we bring predictability back into the hands of IT and help eliminate risks associated with human error.” Site Recovery Manager works seamlessly with VMware Infrastructure, VMware VirtualCenter, and replication software from storage partners to provide integrated disaster recovery management and automation. It provides: Integrated management of disaster recovery plans. Create, update and document recovery plans directly from VMware VirtualCenter. Non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans. Execute automated tests of recovery plans in an isolated testing environment using the recovery plan that would be used in an actual failover. Hardware configuration dependencies are eliminated and testing can occur without impacting production systems. Automated failover and recovery. Automate execution of the recovery process, eliminating many of the slow and unreliable manual processes common in traditional disaster recovery. With the release of the product, VMware’s parent company, EMC, is one of the first vendors to officially announce support for Site Recovery Manager. Other vendors showing support for the product include 3Par, Dell, FalconStor Software, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, LeftHand Networks, and NetApp.Site Recovery Manager is priced much like VMware Infrastructure: Based on the number of processors in the servers. SRM can be purchased as a standalone product or purchased as part of VMware’s Management and Automation Bundle which includes two-processor versions of VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware Lifecycle Manager, and VMware Lab Manager or VMware Stage Manager. VMware is also giving you the ability to evaluate Site Recovery Manager via download. Software Development