The biggest attraction for the channel here is likely to be its integration with VSPEX, when that is available in Q4.

EMC has added a new member of the RecoverPoint family, RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, designed for VMware-based cloud environments.

“This is a completely new member of the RecoverPoint product family, which is fully virtualized,” said Jean Banko, the Director of Product Marketing with EMC’s Data Protection and Availability Division. “It provides local and remote replication in combination with continuous data protection for per-VM recovery to any point in time, with built-in automated disaster recovery orchestration.”

While RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines brings quality and features of EMC RecoverPoint to a 100% software offering, Banko said this is a way point to a service for the hybrid cloud.

“The long term version of this is data protection as a service for the hybrid cloud,” she said. “We believe hybrid clouds will be pervasive and IT will be the internal broker of services both on-prem and off-prem. This provides a simple, efficient and agile solution for VMware based cloud environments, with local and remote replication for per VM recovery.”

Banko stressed that the solution includes a robust set of APIs to facilitate additional integration.

“Next year, you will see integration with VCenter Automation Center, and our ITBM [IT Business Management] solution, and we will also add the self-service portal and service catalogue for ITBM,” she said.

Banko said RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines is suited for a broad market.

“It will appeal to large enterprises and service providers, but we also think the midmarket is a prime sweet spot because it will be integrated with VSPEX,” she said. “VSPEX is the right solution to deliver it there.”

RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines is a member of the RecoverPoint family, but Banko said the difference between how this product works compared to RecoverPoint is night and day.

“The only similarity between the two is they are deployed as a virtual appliance on ESX server,” she said. “Everything else is different. The old product was really aimed at storage admins, and at that protection level, all VMs have to have the same protection policy. The new one is more granular. It takes the RecoverPoint technology and brings it into the hypervisor level. It is really for virtualization admins.”

Banko said this product also has a much broader addressable market.

“This is completely storage-agnostic because of the embedded hypervisor splitter,” she said. “The old one wasn’t, and was only block based storage. Any storage array supported by VMware is now supported by this. It opens up a great market for us, the whole file-based solution market.”

At launch, RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines (unlike its predecessor) only supports the VSphere hypervisor.

“There is a time frame to extend it to other hypervisors, although it won’t be very soon,” Banko said.

As an incent to tempt new customers, EMC is offering a free trial ‘Try & Buy’ download starting in October. A free, fully functioning RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines license will be available — for non-production environments only.

RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines is scheduled for availability in late September. It will not be available as part of VSPEX at launch however. That is scheduled for Q4.