Datrium Offers Disaster Recovery as a Service with VMware Cloud on AWS

Datrium, pioneer of the secure multicloud data platform for the resilient enterprise, today announced the introduction of Datrium DRaaS with VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS. Built on Datrium’s popular workload orchestrator, ControlShift, this new SaaS solution provides the world’s first production support of fully automated failover to the VMware Cloud on AWS based on snapshots held in AWS S3. Datrium DRaaS offers comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) and cloud backup for data protection of on-premises Datrium DVX systems, with Datrium providing a single point of ordering, billing and support, eliminating the need to manage AWS and VMC accounts directly. Datrium DRaaS enables organizations to make the cloud their DR data center at a fraction of the cost of a second data center, delivering 10x or greater cost savings. Enterprises using Datrium DRaaS can be confident that their DR plan will provide fast failback, granularly recovering thousands of VMs after a sudden disaster or a rolling disaster such as a ransomware attack, and benefit from significantly reduced administrative time and complexity. 

“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 center and an on-demand SDDC on VMware Cloud on AWS. Data-reduced VM snapshots on S3 and on-demand provisioning of the data center 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-optimized, 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: DatriumDRaaS 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 minimize 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 centers, 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 centers worldwide. Organizing 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 center 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.”

Datrium DRaaS currently supports recovery to AWS regions including Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (London) and the East and West United States.
As a fast-growing regional accounting and business advisory firm, IT needs to keep our professionals productive with fast applications that are always available,” said Igor Zaika, IT Director, Sensiba San Filippo. “The Datrium Automatrix platform has helped productivity with 150x lower application latency and a simple, cost-effective business continuity platform. The combination of primary, backup and disaster recovery in a single system with automated orchestration through Datrium’s ControlShift SaaS and cost-effective cloud backup through Datrium’s Cloud DVX is unlike anything else in the industry today. We plan to quickly adopt Datrium’s DRaaS with VMware Cloud on AWS to further improve our business continuity now that on-demand cloud DR is an economic reality.” 

“In the financial services business, we must comply with long-term retention regulations in addition to regular disaster recovery audits,” said Daryl Dressler, Solutions Architect, Intuition LLC. “As a long time Datrium DVX customer, we enjoy the 10x performance increase, zero storage management and 6x faster RTO that the Automatrix platform provides, and we are particularly interested in using Cloud DVX to reduce our archiving TCO compared to tape systems. We look forward to using Datrium ControlShift to automate disaster recovery between our data centers with continuous compliance and automatic audit reports to make DR simple and fast.”