VMware's annual conference VMworld 2011 kicked off this Sunday in Las Vegas. Many of the new product announcements made at the show revolved around availability and disaster recovery in the Cloud or in virtualized environments.

Here are some of the most notable ones:

SunGard's availability services arm has added a high-availability option to its standard service portfolio for enterprise cloud customers looking to deploy mission-critical applications in the Cloud.

For customers that opt for this functionality, SunGard will deploy its enterprise-grade cloud instances at two geographically diverse production sites integrated with recovery capabilities. This will allow their applications to run in an "active-active" environment.

SunGard has also added a recovery option for cloud customers that do not require high-availability architecture. With this option, a secondary cloud site becomes operational within four hours (time frame backed by a Service Level Agreement) of an outage at a primary cloud site.

Another new addition to SunGard's Cloud offerings is the ability to interconnect customer applications running in the company's cloud with physical environments hosted in its data centers. SunGard provides this connectivity within a single data center or between multiple sites.

NTT America also launched an offerings that addresses availability in the Cloud.

Its cloud backup service is powered by an "agentless" architecture that continuously backs up business data to one of its data centers. Customers need to set up backup parameters only once, after which the system will add new data blocks incrementally.

This service also has a deduplication feature, which ensures that only new data is added to the backup system to optimize resource utilization.

NTT's Cloud Backup provides virtual disaster recovery and application restoration for post-outage recovery.

Another addition to NTT's cloud portfolio the company rolled out at VMworld is long-term data archiving with regulatory compliance features. The data archiving service has a feature that controls and monitors access to certain types of data. It tracks who accessed data in the archive and when.

Acronis launched a new release of its backup and restoration solution for VMware virtual instances. Acronis says its vmProtect 6 application can recover a VM directly from a backup image without requiring a full restore, leading to recovery times of less than one minute.

The application is installed as a virtual appliance and start backing up VMs and files within five minutes of installation. It has deduplication and compression capabilities.