Outcomes
- Physical DR site eliminated entirely.
- Sub-10-minute RTO achieved on critical workloads.
- 60% reduction in DR total cost of ownership.
- Zero disruption to live production during deployment.
- Fully agentless - no kernel drivers, no agents on any protected workload.
Client Bio
A leading automotive and financial services conglomerate with large VMware estates supporting manufacturing, supply chain, and financial systems requires high availability and strict operational SLAs across all business units.
Situation
The client was running a dedicated physical DR site - a significant and ongoing line item in the IT budget. Under real conditions, recovery time objectives were measured in hours, not minutes. The DR team was stretched maintaining a state of readiness that was rarely tested end-to-end, and the organisation was paying for idle hardware whether a disaster occurred or not.
Impact
The reliance on a physical DR site and manual, multi-tool processes created compounding operational risk. Unpredictable recovery windows threatened production SLAs during drills and real incidents. The cost of maintaining separate, underutilised DR infrastructure with no guaranteed recovery outcome was no longer justifiable.
Solution
Datamotive deployed an agentless VMware-to-AWS DR solution with incremental failback and full orchestration. The platform required no kernel drivers and no agents on protected workloads, eliminating the complexity of the previous multi-tool environment. Automated orchestration replaced manual scripts and legacy workflows. Incremental failback ensured only changed blocks were transferred, reducing both cloud egress costs and recovery time. Because nodes were deployed as part of the migration, DR was operational from day one - no separate DR project, no lengthy rip-and-replace cycle.