If you been following the progress of Azure Site Recovery throughout this year, you will recall that our priority has been to make Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions available to everyone, available everywhere, and easy to use. We first announced the General Availability of orchestrated DR across on-premises private clouds based on Hyper-V Replica in January of this year, following it up with support to enable Microsoft Azure as a DR site in October. CIOs that seek to save precious CAPEX and OPEX spent in managing their own secondary site can now rely on Microsoft Azure, making it the ideal destination for disaster recovery. With the acquisition of InMage Systems and the integration of InMage Scout as a replication technology within ASR, we expanded support for VMware and Physical environments, furthering our goal to build a unified, end-to-end solution for disaster recovery.

Today, we are announcing another significant addition to ASR’s expansive portfolio of replication capabilities. Enterprises that seek to leverage the snapshot and replication capabilities of their Storage Area Network (SAN) Arrays to enable high performance synchronous and asynchronous replication between their on-premises private clouds can now orchestrate end-to-end storage array-based replication and disaster recovery with ASR and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). We are formally announcing the Preview of the new functionality at TechEd Europe 2014, and the feature will become available in ASR in the upcoming weeks. Our storage partners – EMC, NetApp, HP 3PAR, and Hitachi – are also announcing the availability of updated SMI-S Providers for their respective product lines, thereby enabling standards-based integration of their hardware with ASR and SCVMM. Various other storage partners are in final stages of upgrading their SMI-S Providers and support for their hardware will become available in the near future.

EMC has updated its SMI-S Providers so that ASR and VMM can leverage the replication capabilities of EMC’s storage arrays such as VNX and VMAX Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF). EMC VMAX SRDF gives customers the confidence that RPO and RTO goals are met while ensuring complex application environments are protected as a whole using consistency technology. The new VMAX3 software architecture allows for even more effective use of CPU power taking advantage of multi-core and multi-threading technologies for parallelization of the replication workload.

NetApp has updated their SMI-S Provider for the NetApp FAS Storage (Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2). By using ASR in combination with its SnapMirror, NetApp customers can protect their virtualized business-critical workloads, such as databases and email with simple-to-deploy disaster recovery. Customers that use SnapMirror for ASR SAN replication can confidently run their enterprise application workloads on Hyper-V, knowing that they have enhanced disaster protection for those workloads.

Built on top of world-class assets of System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and Microsoft Azure, the new storage array-based replication and disaster recovery functionality will offer a rich set of features:

• ^NEW Standards-Based (SMI-S) Storage Discovery, Provisioning, and Replication Management in SCVMM ensures complete integration and the ability to leverage replication capabilities provided by enterprise storage partners. SCVMM will provide comprehensive SAN management capabilities within console
• ^NEW End-to-End Disaster Recovery and Orchestration with ASR and VMM automates the creation and management of all target objects, both storage and compute, to ensure that recovery is guaranteed to work
• ^NEW Synchronous and Asynchronous Replication support that is optimized to help customers achieve the lowest possible RPO and RTO. Capabilities supported by the storage hardware are automatically made available within ASR
• ^NEW Multi-VM Consistency and Replications Groups enable multiple LUNs and Virtual Machines to be protected together, thereby expanding support for applications that require application tiers to replicate consistently and failover at the same time
• ^NEW Support for Guest Clusters that depend on shared storage provided by Shared VHDX or an iSCSI Target. This important new functionality enables disaster recovery and failover of applications such as SQL Server, SharePoint, SAP etc. that rely on shared storage
• ASR Recovery Plans offer robust and simplified one-click orchestration of your DR plans. ASR Recovery Plans can now be designed to contain multiple Replication Groups instead of standalone Virtual Machines
• At-Scale Configuration of Replication Group protecting settings ensures that your applications are configured with the protection policies that they need. With support to map on-premises networks across primary and DR sites, you can be assured that applications will resume and connect post failover
• Self-Service Disaster Recovery model that enables full support for DR drills via test failover, planned failover that guarantees zero data loss, unplanned failover, and failback – All DR actions are assured to be accurate, and consistent and are designed to help you meet your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) goals
• Audit and Compliance Reporting with Reliable Recovery ensures that you get risk-free, non-production impacting, frequent, and high-confidence DR testing that meets your compliance needs. With an inbuilt reporting function that lets you export every activity performed using the service, you can also meet your audit requirements

With its ability to protect and coordinate the replication and recovery of any customer IT environment – Windows or Linux, physical or virtualized on Hyper-V, VMware or others – Azure Site Recovery has quickly assumed an important role in the disaster recovery plans of many organizations. As the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, Microsoft is committed to solving our customers’ business continuity challenges and enabling hybrid cloud solutions that work seamlessly across private, partner, and public clouds.

Our Enterprise and SME customers, who have adopted ASR, are already seeing benefits from the ability to consistently replicate, protect, and failover virtual machines across their own on-premises private clouds, or directly to Microsoft Azure – ASR is engineered to help our customers meet their Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and optimize their Recovery Time Objective (RTO) when recovering from a disaster that impacts their primary datacenters.

Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup are now also available in a convenient, and economical promotion offer available for purchase through the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement.  Each unit of the Azure Backup & Site Recovery annual subscription offer covers protection of a single instance to Azure with Site Recovery, and protection of up to 100GB of data with Azure Backup.  You can contact your Microsoft Reseller or Microsoft representative for more information.

Visit the Azure Site Recovery forum on MSDN for additional information and to engage with other customers.

Getting started with Azure Site Recovery is easy – all you need is to simply sign up for a free Microsoft Azure trial. Storage Array Replication based Disaster Recovery with Azure Site Recovery is available for free during Preview.