Datrium DRaaS with VMware Cloud on AWS Delivers Industry’s First Instant RTO from Backups on Amazon S3

Datrium unveiled new capabilities for the recently announced Datrium DRaaS with VMWare Cloud on AWS solution. DRaaS now offers instant Recovery Time Objective (RTO) restarts from Datrium backups on Amazon S3-the lowest RTO with VMware Cloud of any Amazon S3-based DR system. Additionally, a new feature, DRaaS Connect, extends instant RTO DR to any vSphere environment. DRaaS Connect is available for two different vSphere deployment models. DRaaS Connect for VMware Cloud offers instant RTO disaster recovery from an SDDC in one AWS Availability Zone (AZ) to another. DRaaS Connect for vSphere On Prem integrates with any vSphere physical infrastructure on-premises. Now all VMware users, both on-premises and in the cloud, have access to cost-effective, reliable, cloud-based disaster recovery with instant RTO.

Unlike most cloud DR approaches, Datrium DRaaS with VMware Cloud on AWS is focused on VMware Cloud on AWS. It requires no conversion to alternative virtual machine or cloud formats, which compromise RTO and require fundamental retraining on a separate type of cloud administration. It also defends against ransomware; by offering direct access to older backups deduped on S3, it can offer a more complete, robust offering for the widest variety of outages. This combination of on-demand compute and low-cost backup storage give it exceptional economics. It offers VM images as runnable snaps to VMware Cloud as a live datastore, so failover is a matter of restarting VMs, not copying them back and rehydrating them from a separate archive which can take days – an additional compromise to RTO.

“In the increasingly hybrid world of IT, business-critical workloads are no longer limited to on-premises infrastructure,” said Steven Hill, senior analyst at 451 Research. “Protecting these portable, VMware-based applications calls for a disaster recovery strategy like Datrium’s new DRaaS platform that’s capable of providing instant RTOs-regardless of where the workloads and backup data reside-and can leverage the resilience and efficiency of S3-based object storage without a performance penalty.”

According to the State of Enterprise Data Resiliency and Disaster Recovery 2019 report, also announced today, ransomware is plaguing the enterprise data center, with nearly 90% of companies considering ransomware a critical threat to enterprise business, and this is driving the need for DR. The research also found that the public cloud is increasingly being considered as a DR site. The vast majority of respondents (88.1%) said they would use the public cloud as their DR site if they would only have to pay for it when they need it. The cloud offers greater ease of use and cost-efficient DR, solving several pain points that are holding organizations back from responding to DR events including the complexity of DR products and processes as well as high associated costs.

Fastest Restart in the Industry: Datrium DRaaS Delivers Instant RTO for Thousands of VMs from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to VMware Cloud

Datrium DRaaS with VMware Cloud on AWS is the first broadly available DRaaS solution for VMware Cloud based on backups on low-cost Amazon S3. It offers instant mass restarts of thousands of VMs from recent snapshots or backups even more than seven years old. The only cost during normal business operations-i.e., when not testing or deploying DR-is that of storing ongoing backups, which are automatically deduplicated, compressed and encrypted. In the event of a disaster, Datrium DRaaS provisions an on-demand SDDC in VMware Cloud on AWS for recovery. All the snapshots in S3 are instantly made executable on a live cloud-native NFS datastore mounted by ESX hosts in that SDDC, with caching on NVMe flash. Unlike traditional backup-based approaches to DR, Datrium DRaaS delivers the industry’s fastest RTO because there is no rehydration time required to copy backup data into an SDDC before restarting the virtual machines. Datrium DRaaS enables backups to be projected as a live datastore for DR in a simple, cloud-native design.

Datrium DRaaS Takes the Disaster Out of Recovery for All VMware Environments

Datrium DRaaS with VMware Cloud on AWS will now provide disaster recovery services for any vSphere infrastructure on-premises including SANs, NAS, HCI and DHCI, and any VMware workload in the public cloud. DRaaS Connect, lightweight software for any vSphere infrastructure and a new feature of DRaaS, will enable customers to start protecting VMs in minutes.

DRaaS Connect for vSphere On Prem extends Datrium DRaaS to any vSphere on-premises infrastructure and provides efficient replication of vSphere snapshots into DRaaS deduplicated, compressed, encrypted snapshot storage on Amazon S3. It will be managed by a DRaaS cloud-based control plane to define VM protection groups and their frequency, replication and retention policies. On failback, DRaaS will return only changed blocks back to vSphere and the local on-premises infrastructure through DRaaS Connect.

DRaaS Connect for VMware Cloud will enable DRaaS to orchestrate failover from a VMware Cloud SDDC in one AWS Availability Zone (AZ) to another AWS AZ. Snapshots of running VMs in the active AZ will be stored in the DRaaS repository on AWS S3. In the event of a disaster, these snapshots can be instantly restarted on ESX hosts in a different AZ, all based on well-defined runbook policies. Both DRaaS Connect options will be available in Q1 2020.

“Datrium DRaaS with VMware Cloud on AWS is radically transforming DR with its cloud-native design,” said Tim Page, CEO of Datrium. “It delivers failproof instant restart from ransomware and other types of disasters for any vSphere environment with unprecedented on-demand economics. It’s like pressing the easy button for DR.”

Channel Partners Embrace Datrium DRaaS to Transform the DR Market

Datrium also announced new technology partnerships and channel partnerships to drive accelerated adoption and expansion of Datrium DRaaS across the IT landscape. Datrium DRaaS with VMware Cloud provides VMware vSphere customers a low cost, fast and failproof approach to disaster recovery. Together, with AWS, Datrium offers long-term data retention, using Amazon S3 economically to help enterprises stay resilient in the face of disaster. Datrium DRaaS is now available through Datrium’s channel partners including Champion Solutions Group, Mindsight, PTS Data Center Solutions and Technologent.