IT teams are under growing pressure to answer the question at the center of every migration and DR plan: can a full application workload move from one environment to another, reliably and on the organization's terms, without being locked into where it runs today?

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Even as Broadcom's VMware licensing changes put exit plans on the table, their removal of public VDDK access cut off any migration tools that depend on it. Organizations that do exit find that their hypervisor-dependent DR products stop protecting workloads once they leave VMware.

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Compliance and sovereignty requirements such as DORA are putting concentration risk and exit planning under regulatory scrutiny, and recent outages at Azure, AWS, and GCP proved that failing over between regions within a single cloud does not remove dependence on that provider. Finally, rising GPU costs at the hyperscalers are compounding the motivation to move workloads wherever capacity is priced competitively.

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Although demand for workload portability continues to increase, migration and DR tools tied to a specific hypervisor, storage layer, or provider stop at that boundary. Migration projects take months of preparation because no two environments are alike, and DR plans often go untested until the moment they are needed.

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Filesystem-level replication takes a different approach. It replicates the workload itself rather than the platform underneath it, making the workload itself the unit of mobility across hypervisors, clouds, and physical infrastructure - for both migration and DR.

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In this interview-style webinar, RackWare Product Manager Riley Burden talks with founder and CTO Todd Matters about why workload mobility has become a standing requirement, how the main replication approaches compare, and what changes for organizations that build migration and DR on a filesystem-level foundation.