RE Cloud Backup as a Service Launches DR Supporting Infrastructure

RE Cloud (Richardson Eyres) BaaS launched of DR supporting infrastructure.

It is a managed cloud backup and restore solution for physical and virtual environments on customer sites. It provides a way to restore data in the event of HDD crashes, power surges, dropped or stolen laptops, accidental deletes and even full-blown disasters.

RE Cloud have BaaS clients with the facility for an on-demand virtual data centre in RE Cloud at no extra cost. VMs are stored on the cloud via its BaaS. In the event of a disaster customers can opt to restore service in RE Cloud via the portal or through a managed recovery provided by the support team.

RE cloud BaaS – DR Supporting Infrastructure:
With the launch of DR in RE Cloud for their BaaS clients, there is one common question that customers keep asking, and that is “Where do they run required supporting infrastructure like active directory, DNS, and other services they need?“

Customers may, or may not be aware about how closely RE Cloud IaaS and RE cloud BaaS work together. The company provides its Backup as a Service clients with an on-demand virtual data centre (VDC) in the event of a disaster. VMs and physical servers with image backup schedule can be restored to a pre-configured VDC in RE cloud. The replicated workloads use only storage resources until customers fail them over. There is no compute and memory utilisation until these machines are powered on. Supported infrastructure can of course be included in those recovery groups, however the company advise against it. So what should you do?

It is general industry practice to run the supporting infrastructure, like for example a domain controller, hot and always on in the DR site and there are many reasons why. The DR site will most likely have a different IP address range and therefore it can be treated as simply another ‘site’ in active directory with its services running there, waiting for failed over machines to use them. Secondly, running a hot workload in DR can cut down RTO as clients VCD will be already configured and connected to clients corporate HQ or other sites. The clients DR run book will therefore be thinner. It offers a few options for solving the need for these running VMs.

VPN between clients physical and RE cloud resources:
In cases where a company hosts their workloads in their own location or data centre and because of some reasons leased line is not required, an IPSec VPN tunnel can be created. vShield Edge Gateway follows IPSec industry standards, therefore it is possible to create a communication tunnel with any other 3rd party device.

Private leased line:
Some customers due to bandwidth or compliancy needs may require a leased line or MPLS.

Cloud to cloud VPN:
RE cloud vDC can communicate with any other private or third party cloud provider devices that support IPSec.

Other considerations:
As with almost anything in IT, there are some considerations:

• For VPN, the endpoint network cannot be the same

• Define RE Cloud network in active directory as a new ‘Site’ and assign the correct domain controller

• Make sure that VPN endpoints have the correct firewall rules to pass the traffic between sites