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RackWare aims to address enterprise disaster recovery pain points—such as cost, flexibility and automation—with a new cloud-based DR offering that delivers server protection and failover at a lower cost than a fully replicated data center.

RackWare has sold its offerings primarily through direct sales as well as cloud service and managed service providers that either sell or white-label its products. Earlier this year, RackWare started working with VARs.

The cloud is a natural extension of what VARs do for their customers in the data center, and they continue to work as trusted advisors to their customers,” said Eric Sherman, vice president of worldwide sales, RackWare.

As momentum in the VAR channel has started to pick up in the past few months, RackWare has engaged with about a half-dozen VARs and that number will “grow fairly significantly over the next three to six months,” Sherman said.

Although RackWare has not formally launched a partner program (plans are forthcoming), the company offers VARs the typical benefits of any software company, Sherman said. This includes hands-on support in selling RackWare’s products to VAR customers as well as helping VARs fulfill those services or training them to ensure they are fully capable to fulfill those services themselves. The company also provides leads, joint marketing activities, including events and webinars, and sales enablement and marketing tools.

RackWare’s automated cloud management solution, with integrated cloud migration and management capabilities, is designed to help enterprises move their servers or workloads seamlessly between private, public or hybrid cloud environments, while allowing customers to manage their resources—for example, during times of higher demand—without having to increase their own data center capacity—and helps contain costs by using resources only when needed, said Sherman.

The company’s newest offering—RackWare Management Module 3.0 (RMM 3.0)—is designed to lower the cost of DR for enterprise data centers, whether traditional or cloud-based, and to help enterprises protect IT resources in case of planned and unplanned outages. The “anywhere to anywhere” DR offering provides end-to-end failover automation, which includes replication, sync, monitoring, failover and failback.

RMM 3.0 addresses three trade-offs customers were making in disaster recovery: cost, flexibility and level of automation, particularly in failover, said Sherman. “The foundation of what we do is to make customer servers or workloads portable so they can move between physical, virtual, private cloud or public cloud in any direction,” said Sherman. “On top of the portability foundation, we add automation and intelligence.”

The RMM 3.0 couples the portability technology with safe replication monitoring and policy-based failover to deliver a cost-effective and flexible DR solution, added Sherman.

The new capability “provides whole-server protection and failover at a fraction of the cost of running a fully replicated data center architected for high-availability or clustering technologies,” according to the company. This helps enterprises extend their DR into the cloud without the need to buy additional hardware or proprietary software, or duplicate their data centers.

Gina Roos, a Channel Insider contributor, specializes in technology and the channel.