Enterprise DR that won't break the bank

Enterprise DR is like having insurance for your cell phone.

 
Thank you, Kevin Kornblith, for this analogy.
 
Some people can lose a phone, and if they take a week to get a new one, it’s no big deal. Others might drop a phone in the sink and be okay if it takes a couple hours to drive to a store to pick up a new one. Then, there are people who, when they hear that dreaded cruuuunch of a broken phone, they need someone to slap a new phone in their hand immediately. This is how we see disaster recovery solutions today.
 
You’ve got storage based snapshots, which are often performance impacting and confined to finite windows to limit their collateral damage. As a result, they don’t run often; and it’s very common to have a snapshot once every 24 hours. Although cost effective, you expose yourself to losing 23:59 hours of data. In a real disaster and failover, the environment would still need to be pieced back together.
 
Business Continuity systems, like Veeam, do an excellent job at protecting data, and their recovery points continue to shrink. They’re now down to a 15-minute Recovery Point, which is excellent for their continuity role. However, if you’re in an industry with a high cost of downtime, you might still need something better. Active-Active systems are an option – but wow, you’re going to pay for it.
 
For a fraction of the cost of active-active, you should use Zerto. Zerto is hardware and hypervisor agnostic with Recovery Points of 5 seconds and Recovery Times of 10 minutes.  It also has a couple of bonuses that can be used while you wait and hope to never need a true DR solution.
 
Zerto can be used to migrate VMs. Since it’s hardware and hypervisor agnostic, you can migrate from AWS to Azure to any storage array. Its non-disruptive DR testing is fantastic, and you can spin off nearly real-time environments for test dev. Plus, it’s a great tool for cryptolocker or ransomware mitigation – just “roll-back” to the second before an attack.
 
 
 

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