Using these snapshots in its “DR sandbox,” it can test recovery processes as often as desired, will effect recovery in the correct virtual machine boot order, test processes at the heart of application services and can report on the whole process in metrics understandable by the business.

Currently it’s a VMware-only product, but Hyper-V support is planned to follow the hypervisor’s R3 release later in 2012.

The reason for speaking to Virtual Sharp was its release this week of ReliableDR 3.0, which introduces features that allow the service to be used by a service provider, including multi-tenancy and Web-based architecture.

It’s another product that seems to be either a bet on a very niche market or on a future of all-virtualised server environments. As noted elsewhere this week, server virtualisation is by no means ubiquitous — running at around 35% of servers in the UK in Q3 2011 — so it puzzles me how products like these get a look in at many organisations.

It’s not that you can’t use Virtual Sharp’s product to manage physical servers. It’ll help get them back up for you, but it can’t guarantee your recovery point objective (RPO). Half the company’s claimed customers are in financial services. Presumably none of these are running physical servers — which people tend to do for their most sensitive applications, so I believe — or are happy to manage DR via other methods?

Curious.

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Two recent emerging vendors/products have cited the demands of applications, virtual servers and desktops as drivers for the location of storage right next to the hypervisor. The first is Nutanix, which has come up with a sort of clustered DAS.

The second is Fusion IO, which I spoke to this week. Fusion IO sells NAND flash that goes into the hypervisor server, acts as local storage and takes the load off arrays that struggle with the huge, random I/O demands of multiple virtual machines.

Fusion IO has shipped 20 PB of its stuff and, among other things, claims to totally remove the dreaded “boot storm” of VDI environments, in which multiple users start their desktops at the beginning of a work shift.

So, it seems the needs of virtualisation are driving a move to locate storage near to the CPU so as to reduce latency. Whether it all needs to be there is the question; perhaps it’s just a super cache Fusion IO-style that needs to be so close to the action?

PS: There seems to be an unspoken axiom in storage along the lines of “hardware is fundamental, but software is where you make money/differentiate your product.”

As if to illustrate this, Fusion IO, a relative newcomer to the market, last year launched the ioMemory Virtual Storage Layer (VSL). In doing so, Fusion IO moved from simply being a company (and not the only one) that sells server-based NAND flash to one whose software could now help that flash operate way closer to the server’s memory than a simple bolt-on flash card, further reducing latency in the process.