Hostway Launches Replication and Disaster Recovery Solution, Utilizing New Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Replica Feature

Company Is One of the First to Offer New Virtual Machine Failover Solution with Cross-Site and Site-to-Site Replication on Hyper-V

Chicago, September 4, 2012 — Hostway, a leading provider of cloud, managed and hybrid cloud services, today announced the beta launch of its new virtual machine (VM) replication service, one of the first VM replication services for disaster recovery (DR) on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. This service is enabled by the Hyper-V Replica feature included in the newly released Windows Server 2012 operating system.

Hostway’s new replication service leverages the company’s geographically dispersed data centers to provide a complete cloud-based DR solution that enables seamless and low-cost cross-site and site-to-site VM replication to support both planned and unplanned failover resolution. The service provides a compliance-level solution to meet SOX, HIPAA, SEC and other regulatory compliance requirements.

According to a 2011 Symantec SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, system downtime costs an average of $75,000 per day for businesses that are unprepared for failure and lacking a robust disaster recovery plan. The loss is compounded by the fact that these costly outages happen an average of six times per year. Even more concerning, half of the SMB respondents surveyed said their company had no DR plan in place.

Hostway’s new service enables SMBs and other businesses to leverage the company’s affordable public or private cloud infrastructures to establish a real-time, compliance-quality, reliable DR solution. Businesses can perform cross-site replication of VMs from one on-premise Windows Server Hyper-V host to another – for example, from an in-house office location to the Hostway cloud. Or, they can perform site-to-site replication of VMs from one Hostway datacenter to another, for real-time, geographically dispersed disaster recovery. Hyper-V Replica is application-agnostic, supporting even legacy systems, and storage-agnostic to support a wide variety of storage environments.

“With more companies moving mission-critical data to VMs, it’s more important than ever for them to have a failsafe in place and create virtual machine redundancy across data centers to guarantee 100% application availability,” said Aaron Hollobaugh, VP of Marketing & Communications for Hostway. “Windows Server 2012 addresses some of our customers’ important concerns, because it not only makes it easier to store and manage all this virtual data, it enables companies to easily set up replication and failover to ensure business continuity.”

Earlier this year, Hostway became one of the few hosting partners selected by Microsoft to offer the release candidate version of Windows Server 2012 to customers for beta testing and feedback. With the official launch of Windows Server 2012, in addition to Hyper-V Replica, Hostway is now offering the full Windows Server 2012, with capabilities including:
Cloud-optimized capabilities for mission-critical applications and website hosting, with increased website density and efficiency, scalability and elasticity for multi-tenant applications, and enhanced support for open standards, open-source applications and multiple development languages.
Multi-machine management environment that provides a cohesive, dashboard vantage point of all servers and their roles for complete visibility and efficient management.
Continuous-availability, high-performance storage with automatic failover protection to eliminate blackouts, service interruption and lost data.



“Hostway’s multiple, geographically dispersed datacenters enable customers worldwide to take full advantage of the new Hyper-V Replica capability in Windows Server 2012. By giving customers a solution based on Hyper-V Replica, Hostway gives customers a robust, affordable and easy-to-manage VM disaster recovery solution,” said Ian Carlson, Director, Product Marketing, Server and Tools, Microsoft.

The new Hyper-V Replica-enabled service and other components of Windows Server 2012 are available as an add-on for customers currently using or newly purchasing a Hostway FlexCloud Server virtual machine. For the time being, onboarding, process and access support for the replication and DR service will be provided by Hostway’s FlexCloud Server support team. Upon the release of Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1 RTM, Hostway will offer the service as a fully customer-configurable and -manageable, production-ready solution backed by Hostway technical support.

For more information about Hyper-V Replica-enabled DR and other capabilities now available on the new Windows Server 2012 software through Hostway, visit www.hostway.com/windows-server-2012.