VMware’s vision of cloud computing is one step nearer following news that USA hosting specialist iland opened a datacenter in London and launched a range of hosting offerings for virtual servers.

Orsini: We guarantee resources.

Dante Orsini, iland’s Channel Director, told The Hypervisor iland had struck a partnership with virtualization tools specialist Vizioncore that combines Vizioncore’s vReplicator software with disaster recover (DR) hosting from iland. The new offering allows firms to replicate their VMs to iland’s datacenter so they are ready to be activated in case an incident takes the main systems off-line.

Orsini said, “Customers replicate their workloads and we allocate a standby resource pool that guarantees the resources they need. The customers can test their replicas as often as they like.”

The offering is particularly attractive to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) because it removes many of the high costs associated with running a disaster recovery site. For example, disaster recovery sites typically require expensive storage and Internet links which are difficult to justify in smaller organisations. The new iland option means firms could use ordinary broadband links and Vizioncore tools to easily replicate VMs with virtually none of the cost and complexity of traditional DR scenarios.

Neither iland nor Vizioncore sell directly to end users. Instead independent third party resellers market the products to end users, which means your normal IT supplier might not currently offer this particular set of products. As always, it pays to shop around.

The Hypervisor has been monitoring DR options for SMEs over the past 18 months. For a full summary of the options see our white paper.