You’re Protected with Simple, Low-Cost BlueXP DR Solution with NetApp

By Richard Treadway, responsible, BlueXP data protection, NetApp, Inc.

DR shouldn’t be about ‘waiting for the worst.’ – a natural disaster, a ransomware attack, or the unknown.

Done right, it’s about taking control, planning ahead, and making sure that the unthinkable doesn’t ever become your reality. Unfortunately, most DR solutions on the market today are complex and costly, leading to a ‘least favorite task mentality that can compromise the business.

That’s why weannounce that NetApp BlueXP DR is generally available. This new service offers simple, low-cost disaster protection for VMware workloads from on premises to a VMware Cloud backed by Amazon FSx for NetApp Ontap. We’re also extending the service to include support for on-premises to on-premises DR, which is now in public preview and will be generally available soon.

Cost continues to be a significant barrier to implementing a DR plan. Traditional approaches required duplicate infrastructure, redundant data centers, and dedicated IT personnel. The upfront capital expenditure and ongoing maintenance costs associated with these solutions are prohibitive for many organizations, especially SMEs. It was time for a proven, reliable DR service that didn’t require that redundant cost structure in order to be secure against disaster.

Ensuring the reliability and performance of a DR plan is crucial. The solution must be capable of seamless failover, minimal data loss, and rapid recovery. Achieving this level of reliability and performance can be challenging, because it requires robust infrastructure, data replication mechanisms, and continuous testing to validate the effectiveness of the plan. With decades of implementing business continuity solutions for our customers, we felt that it was time to provide a consumption-based DRaaS solution.

BlueXP DR tackles these challenges head on. This new capability of BlueXP provides simple, low-cost disaster protection for your VMware workloads with intuitive, guided DR failover/fallback workflows. The company is an innovator in providing a SaaS DR solution that lowers cost and complexity and also enables reliable, ongoing, nondisruptive recovery testing.

Performance and reliability
BlueXP DR is fast because it takes advantage of SnapMirror technology, which includes de-dupe, compression, and compaction, along with block-level operation, minimizing the amount of data that needs to pass between systems. This technology slashes costs, data transfer time, and system overhead.

SnapMirror is proven in thousandss of customer organizations, with instant data transfers and application-consistent recovery. Customers get the tight RTOs and RPOs.

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Simplified DR planning makes it easy
The service uses the BlueXP SaaS-delivered control plane with its intuitive UI, simplified deployment, and easy-to-implement automation templates that can manage both on-premises and cloud environments. The simple, nondisruptive DR testing capability allows frequent readiness drills that increase confidence. These automated workflows give you an ‘easy button’ for attaining DR readiness that can be validated on an ongoing basis. You can be confident in your ability to respond if disaster strikes.

Lower risk of failure at most critical time
Whether your recovery site is another on-premises location or uses the VMware Cloud service, you can leverage the same VMware operational dynamics so that your processes, runbooks, and procedures don’t need to change. This means that when disaster strikes you don’t have to learn a new environment with different methods and tools. That’s a big relief for your staff in your most stressful time. The service’s automated, nondisruptive DR drills give your team confidence in the failover/failback steps that might be needed – without affecting production resources or availability. These drills substantially reduce risk with continuous compliance health checks. Multiple point-in-time recovery points provide granular restore operations for complete flexibility. And with the high performance of SnapMirror, your RPOs and RTOs for VMware workload DR get you back in business fast.

Lower cost for peace of mind
When you’re using a VMware Cloud target, BlueXP DR doesn’t require to provision dedicated, alternative infrastructure ‘on standby’ in a 2nd data center, which substantially reduces the cost of your DR solution. It further reduces costs by exploiting SnapMirror technology, which preserves Ontap storage efficiencies (de-dupe, compression, and compaction) to provide the smallest storage footprint. Additionally, firm’s block-level, incremental-forever technology keeps bandwidth resource requirements low to reduce network and storage costs.

BlueXP DR supports both on premises and VMware Cloud on AWS targets.

Let’s take closer look at disaster workflow.

With BlueXP DR, you can:

• Create a templatized DR plan for vSphere apps that are using NFS datastores in Ontap.
• Replicate vSphere apps and data to on premises or to a VMware Cloud DR site in AWS by using proven SnapMirror technology.
• Test the failover process without affecting production workloads.
• Easily failover if a disaster occurs.
• Monitor active DR operations.
• Failback post recovery to the (restored) primary site for normal operations.

We are excited about this new capability, and we encourage you to get started today.

Resources:
BlueXP disaster recovery
Take this guided tour to experience how easy it is to go through all these steps.