There are plenty of challenges when constructing an effective Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy for recovering application workloads from one site to another. These challenges become even more interesting when exploiting the public cloud as a DR option for the failover site. Maintaining Operational Consistency across a hybrid cloud (private & public) environment including staff, skills, tools, and processes can be complex.
One approach to this challenge is to adopt VMware environments for both on-premises primary and the cloud for secondary sites and leverage Datrium DRaaS (DR-as-a-Service) to improve the likelihood of maintaining operational consistency during a DR situation.
In a recent VMUG webinar, I covered this topic in more detail along with a brief demonstration, but I’d like to summarize the approach here.
First, by choosing to run your on-premises infrastructure on VMware vSphere and vCenter and selecting VMware Cloud on AWS as a secondary site for DR purposes, you can leverage a wide base of vSphere and vCenter resources – experienced staff, skills, tools and practices for either site. You lower the risks faced when converting one operational platform to another especially during a critical return to service period. The Datrium DRaaS solution provides all of the VMware Cloud on AWS setup and management tasks needed for creating and configuring the SDDC – including just in time deployment and scalability to also help save on cloud compute costs when there isn’t a disaster at hand.
Second, by implementing Datrium DRaaS, you can protect your on-premises VMware environment easily to the cloud – exploiting efficiencies of cloud storage economics and robust data services like deduplication. Datrium’s Protection Group polices provide the RPO SLAs needed for most organizations. A key aspect of this protection solution is that the data you backup to the cloud can then be instantly live mounted into the SDDC when needed for the critical recovery part of DR providing instant RTO.
Lastly, with the Datrium DRaaS ControlShift DR plan orchestration component, you get a true SaaS delivered solution for defining the run-book mappings and steps needed to fail over VM workloads from on-premises sites into the cloud based SDDC. These plans are continuously checked for compliance and easily tested – increasing the confidence that they will operate as planned when needed for DR. When the DR event has passed and you want to return operations from the cloud back on-premises, ControlShift orchestration makes that process 1-button easy too.
For more information on this solution from Datrium look here – Datrium DRaaS.