Q&A: Interview with PHD Virtual about their Latest Acquisition of VirtualSharp

PHD Virtual announced yesterday that they have acquired privately-held VirtualSharp Software.  To find out even more information about this acquisition news, I was able to catch up with Robert Payne, marketing specialist at PHD Virtual.  

VMblog:  So you guys just made an acquisition announcement.  Can you tell us a little about the acquired company -- VirtualSharp?

Robert Payne:  VirtualSharp is a virtualization and cloud software company that develops a next generation disaster recovery (DR) assurance solution automatically certifying achievement of Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs). This solution, named ReliableDR, automatically certifies the recoverability of business services running in the private or public cloud. VirtualSharp's software enables high levels of resiliency for virtual IT infrastructures and full alignment between IT disaster recovery and corporate business continuity planning. VirtualSharp has approximately 15 employees and more than 45 customers.

• Founded in 2010
• CEO - Carlos Escapa
• Incorporated in the US, with offices in the US, UK, and Spain
• Listed as Gartner Cool Vendor in 2012
• #10 in Storage Newsletter's Top 15 Fastest Growing Storage Start-­‐ups
• Strong Executive Management experience in storage, virtualization and DR

VMblog:  And what were some of the reasons why PHD acquired VirtualSharp?

Payne:  In today's compliance focused world, organizations are demanding more frequent verification that their disaster recovery processes actually work.

VirtualSharp Software has pioneered the concept of disaster recovery assurance in order to address this complex problem. Disaster recovery assurance leverages the synergies between the virtualization and storage layers, which allow DR to be orchestrated and automated across data centers. Recovery tests can be executed without any human intervention and without impacting production systems. DR assurance enables the automated enforcement of Recovery Point Objectives or RPOs (maximum data loss) and the continuous measurement and compliance of Recovery Time Objectives or RTOs (maximum outage time).

With the acquisition of VirtualSharp, PHD Virtual delivers transformational technology for virtual backup and disaster recovery assurance providing the easiest, most affordable solutions for data protection and business continuity, automatically certifying achievement of both RTOs and RPOs. With PHD - customers get ironclad assurance!

VMblog:  Can you tell us about some of the business benefits to the merger?

Payne:  PHD Virtual and VirtualSharp bring several business benefits to the table, positioning the unified organization to grow and succeed in the virtualization market much better than the two companies could have done individually, thus increasing our competitive position. The combined company now achieves the following:

• Expanded market opportunity -­ greater ability to capture more of the $4.6B data protection market opportunity (Source: 451 Group) as well as the ability to participate in the $22B disaster recovery market.
• A larger global presence -­ VirtualSharp accelerates PHD's expansion into EMEA - PHD accelerates VirtualSharp's expansion in North America.
• A strongly positioned portfolio for the SMB, SME/Enterprise, and Cloud markets with clear opportunity to cross sell ReliableDR to existing PHDVB customers.
• An immediate boost to sales and marketing for VirtualSharp.
• An immediate boost in development skills in the areas of virtualization, automation, storage integration, application awareness, and data protection to help drive future product strategy.
• Ability to bring a PHD Virtual CloudHook DR solution to market sooner.
• VirtualSharp accelerates PHD SAN based snapshot support and PHD accelerates Virtual Sharp Host based snapshot support.
• Additional service and revenue opportunities for channel partners versed in storage replication and application testing, thereby providing additional value to our respective partners, and potentially driving increased mindshare for our expanded portfolio of products.
• A new route to market through Cloud Services Providers that need to expand their services portfolio, and differentiate themselves with high value-add offerings.
• The opportunity to partner with storage suppliers and bring a solution that leverages the advanced features of new storage arrays and extends the investment of their install base.

VMblog:  Talk to us about who VirtualSharp's customers would be and what their key challenges are that the solution solves.

Payne:  VirtualSharp sells into mid-sized and large customer as well as into Cloud service providers. Their solutions are best suited for companies subject to regulatory compliance or to those with a high cost of downtime.

Key Challenges:

• The cost and complexity of virtual backup and virtual disaster recovery management continues to increase as the number of VMs in production continues to grow.
• New technologies, processes and configuration changes in virtual environments are being introduced at an accelerated rate - the sheer volume makes it difficult to manage and track individual changes.
• Application and infrastructure complexity (virtual, public and private cloud) is increasing the number of individual components that combine to deliver IT services - this growing interdependency fuels risk as individual failure can cause severe disruption to IT services.
• On top of this complexity, new, more aggressive recovery time targets are being required by customers. There is an increased need for more frequent and lower-cost disaster recovery testing as well as the need to satisfy regulatory DR compliance requirements.

According to Gartner Group, the high cost of disaster recovery testing is a critical obstacle - most organization's report spending $30k-$40k per test - some spending as much as $100k per test. The cost of DR testing must be reduced. This is causing over stretched IT personnel to rethink their virtual backup methods as well as how they can cost effectively orchestrate a disaster recovery plan they can not only rely on, but guarantee. 

VMblog:  And how will the VirtualSharp acquisition allow PHD to solve these challenges?

Payne:  Disaster recovery is an area where legacy DR processes are still the norm. They are slow, cumbersome, unreliable, and unrealistic. VMware Site Recovery Manager attempts to compete with ReliableDR, but falls short in many respects. Veeam has some DR features, but it is still primarily a backup solution and does not come close to the robust capabilities of ReliableDR. Let's take a closer look:

• DR Compliance - ReliableDR is very clear in how it measures the validity of your DR plan: you simply state your RPOs and RTOs, and it tests the actual points and times achieved against those objectives, and reports this information using dashboards, exported reports, email reports and SNMP to ensure that you have complete awareness of how your plan is performing. This gives invaluable insight into how changes in an environment can impact a DR plan over time, and proactively brings attention to any issues way before an outage occurs.
• SRM and Veeam have no such capabilities: they leave you wondering whether you'll have any chance of meeting your organization's stated objectives when a disaster occurs. 

• Application Awareness - ReliableDR is the only product on the market that performs detailed, out-of-the-box application aware testing of the DR service, so you know it will work in the event of an outage. It is important to cover all application components and how they interact in your DR testing. ReliableDR automates the entire process.
• SRM has no such capability: All you know is that a VM can boot and talk on the network.
• Veeam can perform this type of robust testing, but only against backups, which have no automated failover capability and require additional, time consuming restore processes. Veeam cannot compare that testing progress to objectives either. 

• Replication Flexibility - ReliableDR offers its own built-in replication, but it can also integrate with enterprise-level array based replication. This flexibility makes it very extensible to mid-market and enterprise customers that have a vested interest in DR assurance. The great thing about its storage replication is that the architecture is agnostic to the storage platforms and can easily add new storage vendors without making significant changes to its products.
• SRM also has these two options for replication, but requires new adapters to be built for each new storage model it supports, making it less flexible with its integration.
• Veeam has no storage replication integration whatsoever in its product. 

• Certified Recovery Points - It is very important to ensure that bad data at the production site does not manifest itself at the DR site. The DR site is there to protect from these types of issues, not inherit them. ReliableDR offers multiple Certified Recovery Points to ensure that issues at the production site are caught during the DR test process and the DR site can easily rollback to earlier points in time.
• SRM has no rollback capabilities at all, leaving the DR site at risk if bad data gets replicated from the production environment.
• Veeam does have multiple recovery points for its replication process, but that process is never tested. Therefore, they are not certified and verified recovery points like ReliableDR CRPs.