DRaaS with VMware Cloud on AWS

“Let’s face it – DR has been more disaster than recovery. It has been virtually impossible to have legitimate DR for decades, and the problem just keeps getting worse with exponential data growth and overall complexity,” said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at ESG. “Now with Datrium, VMware users can finally have a true disaster recovery option that works essentially automatically – regardless of the complexity of the environment. It’s elegant insurance.”

Datrium DRaaS gives customers complete, one-click failover and failback between their on-premises data centre and an on-demand SDDC on VMware Cloud on AWS. Data-reduced VM snapshots on S3 and on-demand provisioning of the data centre in the cloud provide 10x economic savings. Isolated test bubbles, fully orchestrated failover, compliance reports and a consistent management experience on-premises and in the public cloud guarantee that failover and failback always work. With its built-in support for VMware both on-premises and in the cloud, Datrium’s failproof DR eliminates the fear of experiencing conversion failures during a disaster recovery event. Datrium DRaaS maintains VMs in their native vSphere format and eliminates the need for brittle and time-consuming VM disk format conversions. Customers can operate both their cloud DR site and primary site with vSphere and retain access to familiar abstractions and management tools.

Datrium DRaaS runs on the secure, multi-cloud Datrium Automatrix data platform, which converges primary storage, backup, disaster recovery, encryption and data mobility capabilities into a single solution that provides a consistent data plane. By combining these capabilities into a single platform, Datrium eliminates silos and complexity, and prevents the need to independently maintain at least five different separate products.

"Cloud-based disaster recovery has been something of a Holy Grail—great in theory, but a lot harder to achieve in practice, thanks to the complexity of marrying up disparate environments. Datrium DRaaS has the potential to completely flip that around – given testing and careful planning, of course! – by guaranteeing a matching DR setup in the cloud," said Bryan Betts, Principal Analyst, Freeform Dynamics.

Benefits of DR with Datrium DRaaS

• Highly cost-optimised, more than 10x more efficient DR: Datrium DRaaS enables failover to an on-demand SDDC on VMware Cloud on AWS using Datrium ControlShift, while storing forever incremental, native backups in AWS S3. Enterprises can now pay for SDDC only when they are  needed while their data remains ready to use on low-cost AWS S3 in globally deduplicated, compressed form. Failback incurs only minimal AWS egress charges after global deduplication. 
• Consistent management both on-premises and in the cloud: Datrium DRaaS maintains VMs in their native vSphere format and eliminates the need for brittle and time-consuming VM disk formation conversions. Users can run both their cloud DR site and primary site with vSphere and retain access to familiar abstractions such as clusters, resource pools, datastores, virtual switches and port groups following a failover.
• Eliminates the headaches as enterprises scale: Datrium DRaaS offers a 30-minute Recovery Compliance Objective (RCO) with autonomous compliance checks and just-in-time creation of VMware SDDCs. The service also delivers a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) from 5 minutes to multiple years, supporting primary and backup data simultaneously.
• Single-click resilience: Non-disruptive, automated DR testing helps ensure peace of mind and business continuity. Automated reporting makes DR audits easy and fast. All data functions across primary, backup and DR are managed through a single interface including AWS S3 and VMware Cloud on AWS. All billing and support is provided by a single vendor, Datrium.
• Simple recovery from current snapshots or old backup data: Datrium DRaaS enables simple recovery from recent snapshots or backups from months or years ago. Converged backup and DR provide millions of point-in-time consistent recovery points to choose from. This can be critical in the event of ransomware events, which often only become apparent months after the initial attack.
• Cost-effective failback from the public cloud: Datrium Automatrix delivers always-on data efficiency, including global deduplication and forever incremental backups to S3, ensuring that only changed data is sent back from the cloud for minimum egress charges. When compared to most cloud backup products today that must restore 100% rehydrated data, Datrium DRaaS can cost 90% less than alternatives. Like failover, Datrium DRaaS failback is fully automated to minimise human errors and administrator wait time.
• Purely software-defined DRaaS on hyperscale public clouds for the least deployment risk long term. Traditional DRaaS required custom, private data centres, such as SunGard and iLand, which entail very capital-intensive business models with significant financial risk. Public clouds at the scale of AWS have significantly less of this risk, and there are highly scaled alternatives now as well, with lots of data centres worldwide. Organising those facilities using a purely software-defined model such as Datrium DRaaS is the safest approach for IT long term.

“Most businesses need an IT DR plan, and most of them also can’t prove the one they have will work. They’re so failure prone, work intensive and often capital intensive that many just give up and hope they never face a data centre outage,” said Brian Biles, Chief Product Officer at Datrium. “Datrium DRaaS is the first solution to completely transform the DR market from the Dark Ages to the Instant Age.”