Top 4 Disaster Recovery as a Service Solutions
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is the replication of an organizations data by a third party to provide IT continuity in the event of a business disruption. A service-level agreement (SLA) between the client and vendor typically specifies the DRaaS requirements, which the vendor usually provides in a cloud-computing environment. The primary advantage of this approach is that an off-site vendor is unlikely to suffer from the same disaster as the client, allowing the vendor to implement a DR plan with greater reliability and added security.
DRaaS also avoids the need for the client to maintain a secondary data center, making DR available to organizations that wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford this capability. Some top Disaster Recovery as a Service solutions currently include the following:
- Hyperscalers (Azure)
- VMware Service Provider
- SaaS (Zerto, Nimble, or Veeam)
- Colocation or Hardware as a Service
Disaster Recovery as a Service Solutions
Hyperscalers – Azure
Azure Site Recovery (ASR) can manage Azure virtual machines replicating between regions. It can also handle replication for Azure Stack VMs, on-premises VMs and physical servers. ASR supports Hyper-V and VMware VMs as well as the Linux and Windows operating systems.
For a simple DR solution, you can set up ASR to manage replication, failover and failback from a single location with the Azure portal. However, you can also set up ASR to perform DR on Azure VMs from a primary to a secondary region. In the case of on-premises DR, ASR can replicate VMs and physical servers to Azure, or to another on-premises datacenter. However, replication to Azure eliminates the cost and effort of maintaining a secondary data center.
VMware Service Providers
VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) protects vSphere VMs by replicating them to the cloud and recovering them to the specified VMware Cloud Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). The target SDDC doesn’t need to support replications in its steady state, and you can create it just before performing a recovery.
The DRaaS Connector allows VCDR to protect VMs running on any storage device within the vSphere environment, whether it’s on the cloud or on-premises. You can also back up these VMs by using protection groups to replicate them to the Scale-out Cloud File System (SCFS) via snapshots taken at regular intervals. You can restart the VMs captured in these snapshots via the recovery SDDC in VMware Cloud.
SaaS – Zerto, Nimble or Veeam
SaaS based DRaaS solutions use multiple methodologies. Some use hypervisor-based data replication, which moves replication from the storage layer to the hypervisor, others use snapshots. They are often storage and hypervisor-agnostic, so you can replicate data between environments and platforms. A virtual replication appliance (VRA) must run on each VMware ESX/ESXi host with VMs that need to be replicated. From the production environment, data can be pointed to a target DR site. SaaS DR solutions also allow you restore data from the DR source to a new target site.
Veeam DRaaS replicates data to a secondary site in the same way as Veeam Cloud Connect Backups. Clients create a replica job by selecting a cloud host and pool of computing resources that include the failover networks.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Nimble Storage and Veeam provide cloud data management that makes it easy to protect and manage data, whether it’s on a physical or virtual environment. The combination of the latest fifth-generation Nimble arrays offer competitive pricing for DRaaS and other use cases like development and testing. Nimble and Veeam are closely integrated, allowing you to manage data protection tasks more effectively. For example, Nimble’s latest inline dedupe reduces storage requirements with Veeam secondary arrays.
Colocation or Hardware as a Service
Colocation and Hardware as a Service are closely related terms. What is colocation? Colocation is when companies lease server space in a data center. Hardware as a Service is when third-party IT service providers sell packages for hardware, software, and maintenance. These service models are ideal for IT teams that are spread thin because they can offload hardware maintenance with 24/7 support.
The biggest benefit of colocation or Hardware as a Service is their flexibility to adapt with businesses over time. This flexibility includes managing growing data, moving apps and data from the private to public cloud, and continually optimizing IT environments.
Technology solutions companies such as ComportSecure have up-time guarantees and unparalleled turnaround time on emergency tickets, allowing in-house teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
Get a Second Opinion on Your Disaster Recovery Strategy
DR is becoming a greater concern for businesses due to the rapid increase in the frequency and sophistication of malware attacks, especially ransomware.
The previous cost barriers for cloud-based DR are dropping, allowing organizations of all sizes to take advantage of this capability. The best place to start with your DR strategy is to request a Disaster Recovery Assessment performed by certified IT experts at Comport.
The DRaaS landscape is highly fractured, but Comport can help your team decipher the differences between solutions and determine the best option for your business needs.
Get started with DRaaS by requesting a Disaster Recovery Assessment.
