HotLink® Corporation has announced the addition of HotLink CIMple™ software-defined networking (SDN) to its HotLink DR Express™ technology. CIMple SDN enables easier testing, greater automation and faster operational recovery in Amazon Web Services (AWS) following a failure in on-premise VMware data centers. Additionally, the new HotLink DR Express features enhanced backup retention and scheduling policies, as well as support for VMware vCenter and vSphere 5.5.

The award-winning HotLink DR Express is the only solution to enable low-cost, comprehensive VMware data protection by leveraging AWS for backup, replication, disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC), using VMware vCenter as the single point of administration and management. Within minutes of a failure, VMware virtual machines (VMs) can be transformed and fully operational in Amazon EC2, with AWS workloads managed side-by-side with on-premise vSphere VMs inside VMware vCenter.   

The new release extends VMware vCenter capabilities to include hybrid SDN, so on- and off-premise networking can be seamlessly and holistically managed and pre-configured with VMware vCenter as the integration hub. By automatically discovering, transforming and mirroring on-premise network configurations in AWS, the new HotLink DR Express removes the complexity and labor-intensive nature of managing hybrid DR networking, maintains networking consistency across application tiers in a recovery, and enables easy DR testing without disturbing production operations. The most important benefit is that with pre-configured, automated network provisioning in AWS, VMware workloads can be accurately and automatically restored in Amazon EC2 in minutes, so operations are minimally disrupted following an on-premise failure.  

“Businesses are accelerating their public cloud spending, with data backup and disaster recovery being some of the top IaaS usage scenarios. By enabling VMware shops to leverage Amazon Web Services for business continuity, HotLink is filling in the missing link (integrated management) that really makes BC/DR achievable — from a technical and a financial perspective. HotLink’s solution appears to be as elegant as it is powerful, which makes it a solution worth investigating as part of modernizing your data protection strategy,” said Jason Buffington, senior analyst for data protection at Enterprise Strategy Group.

Many CIOs and IT managers live in a continuous state of fear that their infrastructure will fail because the process of testing backup and business continuity plans is time consuming, resource intensive and rarely done effectively. When a failure occurs — whether it is hardware failure, software bug or security breach — it can take days or weeks for IT to reconfigure the infrastructure and restore normal operations from backup. HotLink DR Express democratizes DR/BC and makes it affordable for every VMware workload by leveraging AWS as the VMware mirror site. 

“Disaster recovery and business continuity are essential for our business, but the cost of a secondary data center using a colocation provider was prohibitive,” said Scott McGillivray, VP director of Information Technology at Seattle Bank. “HotLink DR Express lets us benefit from the attractive economics of Amazon to ensure that our VMware operations continue uninterrupted, and at only a fraction of the infrastructure and personnel cost of industry alternatives.”

Features of the new HotLink DR Express include:

• HotLink CIMple SDN: Hybrid networks spanning VMware and AWS are intuitively administered and managed in VMware vCenter. Auto-discovery, AWS transformation, granular per-VM configurations and pre-configuration of test and production DR networks enable easy setup and testing ¾ with recovery in minutes in Amazon EC2.
• Enhanced retention policies: HotLink DR Express offers configurable consolidation options for restore points, which enables faster recovery in a failure scenario, reduced storage requirements in AWS and assistance with compliance efforts regarding discovery policies.
• Improved backup scheduling: Enhanced VM protection scheduling allows for off-cycle or non-recurring VM backups to accommodate events such as planned upgrades, security breaches or other periodic activity.
• Support of VMware vCenter and vSphere 5.5: As companies evaluate and migrate from prior VMware versions, HotLink DR Express now readily supports the new VMware environments.

Lynn LeBlanc, CEO and founder of HotLink, said, “Not only does HotLink make DR/BC accessible to cost-sensitive environments, we enable testing and implementing DR/BC plans to be as intuitive as day-to-day operations by seamlessly leveraging VMware vCenter management infrastructure. Our new release takes this ease-of-use even further by automating hybrid networking for the fastest possible recovery following any type of failure, whether it’s a large disaster or everyday hardware failure.”