High Availability Implementation

The Challenge	A premier department store retailer uses VMware® Site Recovery Manager to guarantee application availability in the case of a disaster. VMware® Site Recovery Manager requires that copies of the Virtual Machines (VM) be sent to the Disaster Recovery (DR) site. VMware actually recommends that as a best practice that customers copy the VM to a hard drive and ship it to the DR site and then copy it to the Site Recovery server. All IT administrators know that this is not a practical solution for transferring any type of files, as it involves physical shipping of hardware and manual transfers of critical data. The ideal solution is transferring the VMs via a wide-area network (WAN). However, VMs can be very large and copying VMs across a WAN link can take significant amounts time and also affect other DR services.
The Need	The Retailer needs to be able to quickly copy VMs across a WAN link to the DR site to keep the DR up-to-date without having to physically transport hard drives.
PKWARE vZip SATISFIES THE NEED	PKWARE vZip enables the Retailer’s VMs to be compressed to less than half their size and copied to the DR site across a WAN link in a short amount of time. This allows the retailer to avoid shipping data on hard drives across the country to the DR site. And as a bonus, because the VM is protected with vZip, the WAN link between the primary site and DR site does not need to be secure, lowering the overall cost of implementation.