By Shubha Kumbadakone, Sr. Product Marketing Manager

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of vCloud Air Dedicated Disaster Recovery solution. This innovative DRaaS solution entered Beta towards the end of last year and has seen successful adoption by early access customers. Dedicated Disaster Recovery solution combines different vCloud Air services such as Dedicated Cloud, Hybrid Cloud Manager, and vSphere-based replication to deliver a customized enterprise-centric solution. A range of network and storage options as well as Hybrid DMZ reference architectures are available to customize the solution-based on your recovery point objectives and security requirements.

Fast, Scalable and Secure

Moving to a cloud-based disaster recovery strategy has easily recognizable benefits such as faster and more agile implementation. It is also a cost effective solution as enterprises can avoid significant upfront costs for servers, storage or even a secondary datacenter. Compared to traditional recovery solutions such as hosted recovery with a third party service provider or on-premises secondary datacenters, a cloud-based solution offers lesser overhead. Its intrinsic “as-a-service” component provides better design flexibility, scalability and cost.

However, companies looking at DRaaS solutions still struggle to find the right feature-functionality fit or a solution catering to their individual audit and licensing requirements. This is especially true for organizations in highly regulated industries such as health care, SLED etc. Their network architectures have evolved to become exceedingly complex. Disaster recovery is then a multi-disciplinary problem as they need to port different network architectures, security protocols and firewalls and a variety of applications to the recovery cloud. Ideally, recovery cloud environments should maintain the same performance and security as the on-premises environment.

The core bundle for the Dedicated Disaster Recovery solution comprises of Dedicated Cloud and advanced or enterprise editions of Hybrid Cloud Manager. Dedicated Cloud provides physical isolation for increased compliance and licensing requirements. It can support active-active or warm standby configurations to avoid disasters for critical applications. You can customize your recovery solutions for your unique disaster scenarios. Advanced networking services powered by the NSX platform with capabilities such as micro-segmentation, BGP and OSPF allow portability of firewalls and security protocols from the on-premises environments to the recovery cloud.

Stretched L2 networks, a feature of Hybrid Cloud Manager, remove the need to re-architect workloads when migrated to the cloud. Complete network portability is assured by SD-WAN and WAN optimized replication pipelines. Features like proximity routing mirror on-premises environments into the recovery cloud. This guarantees that the performance on the recovery cloud mimics that on premises. Consequently, runbook plans have reduced complexity ,automation needs are simplified and validation testing is faster.

The true hybrid nature of the solution ensures that customers can protect their entire datacenter and failover about one thousand VMs and a hundred networks concurrently. There is no upper bound on the number of VMs that can be migrated to the recovery cloud. VMs can be migrated with low to zero downtime and recovered quickly. Opt for cold, live or cross cloud migrations of VMs based on your disaster recovery plan.

Not all applications are created equal. As apps evolve, high availability of business critical workloads has become the expected norm. In case of a disaster or an outage, the end user expects at most a degradation in performance but not a complete disruption of service. Mission critical workloads need to be always on. Dedicated Disaster Recovery solution provides enterprises this flexibility to design their disaster recovery plan based on the application tier – disaster avoidance via live migrations, active-active configuration for distributed tier 1 workloads etc.

Customize Your Design Architectures

Enterprises can now truly customize their recovery solution-based on a slew of storage, networking and HDMZ reference architectures available. Start with one of the three base configuration and then customize based on your networking, security and RPO requirements. Learn more about these reference designs in Part 2 of this two part blog series.

To learn more about this new solution and get started designing a cloud-based DR environment that best suits your requirement, click here.