What kind of peace of mind can you get for that investment?
I was chatting with some colleagues the other day about IT data center site processes testing – particularly around DR practices – and we were doing some rough “napkin” estimations. What we came up I found interesting from a budgeting – time and resources – perspective.
Imagine an IT team with a couple of staff members (let’s say 3 people) that are involved for one full day (8 hours) of IT application failover process testing every quarter of the year (a reasonable frequency). Your environments may vary from this estimate but it’s a good start.
That comes out to about 100 person hours of testing task hours per year (3 people * 8 hours * 4 times per year). Actually, not too bad and not too time consuming either. Use this estimate as a gauge or method to determine how much time per year you will need to allocate for people and resources for your particular business needs.
Now imagine your team needs to run these test failover workloads on a couple of (N+1 = 3) servers. Then they will also need about 100 server hours of compute resources too in order to conduct the tests. Compute is pretty easy to spin up / down when needed and ideally, the data for this testing has already been replicated to the remote site saving hours – if not days – of transfer time and bandwidth.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just “rent” the compute IT infrastructure needed for the testing period when you needed them (i.e., 1 business day for 3 servers for 8 hours per quarter)? Even better, imagine running those tests to a temporary data center infrastructure based in the cloud that could be provisioned and decommissioned as needed.
If more time than the above estimate is required, its simple to keep the remote site running until testing has completed – only paying for the compute resources for the time used – and then decommission the resources. Scalability of the infrastructure beyond 3 servers is also handled on-demand.
It’s just that type of “as a Service” solution that Datrium has built into the DRaaS capabilities of the Automatrix platform based on the DVX system. Running and protecting VMware on-premises or to the public cloud and back (VMC on AWS) has never been easier.