Not such a DRaaS-tic action, buying into cloud-based disaster recovery in times like these: VMware to swallow Datrium

VMware is buying Datrium, a business that started out in the cut-throat world of HCI and then switched to disaster recovery in the cloud.

Virtzilla, which is majority-owned by Dell Technologies, cited the security and maintenance of customers' legacy apps and new cloud microservices in hybrid cloud environments as the main driver.

John Gilmartin, VMware's senior veep and GM of its HCI business unit, said the buy is to "expand" VMware's Site Recovery disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) with Datrium’s DR-as-a-Service.

VMware will combine “the consistent infrastructure and operations of VMware Cloud with Datrium DRaaS to reduce the cost and complexity of business continuity” he claimed.

The $4.5bn DRaaS market is the fastest growing segment for data protection use cases, growing at 15 per cent on a compound annual growth rate for the year 2019 to 2023, according to IDC.

Gilmartin added: “After the deal closes, the Datrium disaster recovery (DR) service will expand on the existing performance-optimised VMware Site Recovery DRaaS solution with a cost-optimised option.” Basically, that's disaster recovery in AWS.

If and when the deal closes, the firm's engineering teams will join VMware, with the release salivating over prospective "unique IP" that will also make its way into VMware's purse.

Datrium already had a deal with VMware selling an end-to-end DR service with VMware Cloud on AWS.

Sunnyvale-based Datrium launched in 2012 and has ingested $165m in funding through four funding rounds - with the last cash injection being $60m in 2018.

The company began by developing disaggregated HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) with hyperconverged nodes running storage controller software that linked them to a shared storage box.

As part of that this it devised a way of providing disaster recovery of its on-premises systems to other Datrium systems, and to a Datrium system in the public cloud. This then morphed into to recovering VMware on-premises applications in the cloud. The software has deep integration with the VMware Cloud in AWS and enables a data centre VMware site to failover to the VMware Cloud on AWS.

Datrium previously pushed this as a way to defeat ransomware, seeing it as a killer app.

The news comes against the backdrop of reports that Dell is "examining options" that include a spinoff for its $50bn-ish piece of VMware (it owns 82 per cent of the company).

As we noted a few weeks back, for its first quarter ended 1 May, VMware-on-AWS recorded triple digit year-on-year growth while its virtual storage and network virtualisation products each scored 20-per-cent-plus growth, with CEO Gelsinger saying that cloud was expected to "outperform the technology industry".

With businesses remotely working due to the global COVID-19 pandemic and an increased focus on DR in the cloud, he's likely not wrong. ®