DRaaS - DR as a Service | All about it

Hello Readers,

I'm here with a very interesting new topic to present my views on. While, Disaster Recovery isn't a new topic for professionals & I'm sure many of you might have been involved in building or managing DR setup.

As times have changed & Cloud is inevitable, there are amazing things happening in the space of offering DR as a service, aka DRaaS.

Before I write any further, lets understand very briefly why should any one care form a technology point of view ( cost is a separate discussion & DRaaS turns out to be cost effective too ) -

  • Without the hassle of maintaining another site for DR you can achieve DR for your critical Applications & Services.
  • Completely automate the orderly recovery of services in the event of a site outage at the primary datacenter with Site Recovery. Bring over applications in an orchestrated way to help restore service quickly, even for complex multi-tier workloads.
  • Choice to select Cloud as the secondary site or just use it to orchestrate DR logic in case of catastrophe on-prem set-up ( this could be a Hyper-V based or VMWare based )

Azure Site Recovery is one such service to start with. ASR as its commonly called as is a managed Azure service that allows you to build your DR strategy your way while taking away the complexities. It has engines, components that will run in the background to do the magic. ( More on ASR's internals in next post )

Let me illustrate the 2 basic scenarios with the help of diagrams :

 

 

 

If you choose to make Azure your secondary site,then there are 4 scenarios that are most commonly used -

  • Protect VMware virtual machines: You can protect on-premises VMware virtual machines by replicating them to Azure or to a secondary datacenter.
  • Protect Hyper-V VMs: You can protect on-premises Hyper-V virtual machines by replicating them to the cloud (Azure) or to a secondary datacenter.
  • Protect physical servers: You can protect physical machines running Windows or Linux by replicating them to Azure or to a secondary datacenter.
  • Migrate VMs: You can use Site Recovery to migrate Azure IaaS VMs between regions, or to migrate AWS Windows instances to Azure IaaS VMs.

Hope this crisp blog has given to an introduction to DRaaS and ASR.

More in next post. Have a good week !