Local vendor neutral cloud infrastructure provider, Routed, has been listed as one of ten global providers of VMware’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). As the only South African company to feature on this list, Routed has further established itself as one of the leading VMware cloud service providers. In November 2019, Routed was also the first company within Africa to become a VMware Cloud Verified partner.

Routed Managing Director, Andrew Cruise, says that this is a significant achievement: “We are extremely proud to reach such important milestones within months of each other. As a dedicated VMware partner, Routed is committed to assist enterprise customers, wholesale partners, resellers and affiliates to deploy and utilise the power of VMware technology, and in this case, its DRaaS solution.”

While being listed on the website as an official provider is an achievement, Routed, along with the other nine international service providers have also been hard coded into the VMware vSphere 7 client software: “As an essential services delivery mechanism for the modern hybrid cloud, VMware vSphere 7 is the biggest evolution of vSphere in over a decade. This makes Routed’s inclusion more significant and exciting for us.”

Cruise says that it is about creating a responsive infrastructure that is easily accessible for development, and ultimately enables enterprises to successfully adapt to their customers' changing needs: “Disaster recovery is one of these needs and where we have made some significant inroads. DRaaS is cloud-based data protection and is currently offering a welcome alternative to traditional disaster recovery methods.”

By shifting the responsibility of DR to third-party providers, which harness private or public cloud storage, organisations no longer need to independently equip and operate off-site DR facilities. With DRaaS, an organisation's physical servers or virtual machines (VMs) are replicated to a third-party service provider, who then hosts the customer's infrastructure, using public or private cloud resources, providing a failover target in the event of a disaster.

Guy Bartram, Director Product Marketing Cloud, VMware says: “Routed has proven itself as a specialist cloud provider and dedicated VMware partner. We are delighted at the company’s progress as one of our top cloud providers and currently the only one in Africa listed as a global DRaaS provider.”

Dave Funnell, Senior Manager for Cloud Providers, VMware stated: “The inclusion of Routed as an endpoint for DRaaS within vSphere 7 is a huge boost for the provision of local cloud services. DR is becoming even more critical to all organisations and the requirement for a powerful, but simple to use solution, which can be directly accessed and managed from VMware vSphere is an exciting opportunity for local VMware customers. This latest collaboration between VMware and Routed, following its announcement as the first VMware Cloud Verified partner in Africa, brings further advantages for companies as they accelerate their adoption of cloud.”

VMware vSphere 7.0 was a highly anticipated release and boasts key features such as vSphere Lifecycle Manager, Identity federation, vSphere Trust Authority, Dynamic DirectPath IO, DRS and vMotion.

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