Disaster Recovery as a Service

What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?

In an increasingly digital world, data availability and protection are crucial. It is precisely because of this dependence on IT that a short interruption can already have major consequences. Interruptions can have an infrastructural cause (such as hardware failure, power, or fire), but more often, an interruption is the result of cyber attacks (such as ransomware and hacks) or simply the result of human error. To protect your Cloud against all scenarios, Fundaments offers Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). DRaaS is a service that protects your infrastructure, applications and data by storing them in a different location.

The disaster recovery environment

Disaster Recovery as a Service is based on creating an exact copy of your company's mission-critical application landscape. Should the primary environment become inaccessible due to an emergency, you can easily fall back on the fallback environment to continue working in a familiar way. This makes Fundaments DRaaS an important part of your Business Continuity Plan (BCP).

Data Loss (RPO) and Recovery Time (RTO)

The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) determine, respectively, the degree of data loss and the speed of service recovery after the occurrence of an incident: the “disaster”.

The amount of data loss is determined by the point to which it can be returned, calculated from the time of the incident. With the Fundaments DRaaS solutions, this can optionally take a few seconds, minutes to a few days. The technique used ensures that the production environment writes changes to the fallback environment with the help of a log (called journal). This principle can be used for up to two weeks. If longer retention is required, we recommend our Back-up as a Service (BaaS) service. Looking at the RTO, the Fundaments DRaaS solutions provide a ready-to-go environment. All data is synchronized with the fallback side and compute capacity is available to start the data. Workloads and applications are placed online within minutes of the incident in the fallback environment after activation of the fallback.

Fundaments has two different DRaaS solutions available, which can also be used in combination. The specific layout depends on the requirements with regard to RTO and RPO.

Fundaments' disaster recovery services

Fundaments has two disaster recovery services: Zerto Virtual Replication and VMware Cloud Director Availability. Both DRaaS solutions are fully integrated with the Fundaments IaaS Services. This means that the restoration of an environment, in test or in the event of an actual evasion, can be carried out fully automatically. By pressing the “red button”, any environment can be migrated to the most recent moment: from there, the software used ensures that the workloads are configured on the correct network, renumbering IP addresses and starting in the correct order. This high level of integration also makes it very easy to configure and use the service.

Zerto Virtual Replication

Zerto is a highly renowned player when it comes to DRaaS. With years of experience in providing a cloud-independent solution, Zerto Virtual Replication is the most versatile solution when it comes to evasion: both Hyper-V and VMware vSphere are supported in the Private Clouds, but migration to the public Cloud is also supported with Azure and AWS.

The management of the fallback takes place via an online portal, accessible via the Fundaments Customer Portal. In the portal, workloads can be configured and the current value for the RPO can be viewed. From this portal, it is also possible to start an evasion, both in test mode and before an actual evasion. The simplicity of the portal ensures control over the current status but also makes it easy to manage.

VMware Cloud Director Availability

VMware Cloud Director Availability is a DRaaS solution focused on delivering disaster recovery on the VMware vSphere platform. The product is extensively integrated into the Cloud Director management portal and therefore offers ease of use. The RPO value that can be delivered with this solution is 1 minute, so with this solution there is always 1 minute of data loss. This solution is often also used to migrate from an existing vSphere platform to Fundaments IaaS.

As with Zerto Virtual Replication, it is possible to set up DR protection per virtual server. Here, the RPO can be configured and retention can also be added, so that you can additionally fall back on previous recovery points. This option is often used to fall back into a ransomware scenario.

In addition, a configuration can be added for a test scenario, where the configuration can be fully tested without impacting the service. By default, this functionality is available with the service. Through seamless integration with Fundaments IaaS, this VMware Cloud Director Availability offers an accessible solution for implementing a DRaaS solution, especially if the RPO requirements are in minutes instead of seconds.

Zerto Virtual Replication or VMware Cloud Director Availability?

Fundaments recommends which DRaaS solution is best for an implementation. As a rule of thumb, it can be said that Zerto Virtual Replication is chosen when RPO requirements are less than a minute away, or when there is a difference in virtualization technology between source and fallback platform. Even when a switch to hyperscalers such as AWS and Azure is required, the choice will fall on Zerto Virtual Replication.

Choosing VMware Cloud Director Availability is the best fit for a basic disaster recovery issue based on VMware vSphere. When a 5-minute RPO is acceptable, this solution is a good fit.

The DRaaS service can be used in multiple scenarios: the most used is Cloud to Cloud DRaaS, where the source and fallback sides are both included in the Fundaments IaaS. Another commonly used scenario is a fallback from an office location to the Fundaments IaaS: this is on premises to Cloud DRaaS. This offers the possibility for a disaster recovery service without major investments in in-house hardware.

High-end data center locations

Fundaments DRaaS is offered from a complete Dutch platform, spread over seven locations in the East, Central and Western Netherlands. All production data center locations are Tier3+ locations, the highest achievable class for a Dutch data center at the moment. A Tier3+ data center has thought of everything in terms of security, including guaranteed power supply, burglary protection, water and fire detection and climate control.