Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solutions are inundating the market. Most vendors added the feature to their existing solutions as an afterthought by including the cloud – not integrating it. But DRaaS is maturing and customers are looking for more than just ticking the cloud checkbox. They want complete data protection and recovery both on-premises and in the cloud. They need DRaaS 2.0.
Performance Matters
Performance and the cloud used to be mutually exclusive. But now performance is a critical concern for cloud-based data protection and recovery. First of all, the transfer of data from the protected systems to the on-premises appliance needs to be fast and the transfer from the appliance to the cloud needs to be data efficient given the lack of bandwidth.
All of these transfers also need to be encrypted to keep the organization’s data safe but the DRaaS solution has to have enough available performance to apply the encryption without impacting performance. Also, performance in the recovered state is critical. Users may accept some performance loss versus production but not much.
Quorum’s OnQ solution provides performance at every step. Transfers to the local appliance are fast and transfers to the cloud are data efficient. The solution deduplicates twice. First, source side deduplication eliminates redundant data before it ever is transferred across the local network. Then, OnQ deduplicates and compresses data again before transferring to the cloud.
OnQ really shines during recovery. The on-premises appliance can serve as the initial recovery point. Meaning that if your disaster is “minor” (server, application, storage) then the application can restart on the appliance without having to deal with the network reconfiguration and latency that a cloud connection may introduce. Also because Quorum owns its own cloud, it has direct control over performance allocation. In other words, its cloud isn’t busy running a million other processes like a public cloud would.
Watch On Demand
DR Testing
Most disaster recovery efforts fail from lack of testing. The modern DRaaS solution should enable frequent, automated testing. Quorum’s solution can start up a clone after each update to make sure that it will start up correctly. That way when disaster really does strike, IT can start the recovery process with full confidence it will work.
The OnQ solution can also create a sandbox environment from the systems it protects. This enables IT to start up a VM, or group of VMs, to test patches, upgrades and configuration changes before applying to production.
Ransomware Mitigation
Potentially the biggest threat facing data is not failure of a server, application or storage system, it’s getting infiltrated by ransomware. Certainly a ransomware defense plan is important but at some point it is likely that one of these malware applications will make its way into your environment. In order to recover, the organization needs near continuous protection and that protected copy needs encryption so the ransomware program can’t corrupt it too. Finally the organization needs the ability to restart the application on another server or in another location away from the attack. The Quorum OnQ appliance delivers all of these requirements, all backups are encrypted and the infected application can be started either on the OnQ appliance or in the Quorum cloud.
StorageSwiss Take
DRaaS 2.0 is upon us. It is no longer impressive to restart a failed application in the cloud. Modern DRaaS solutions need to provide secure, efficient data transfer to the cloud while also providing multiple recovery options both on premises and in the cloud. Quorum’s OnQ meets these requirements and moves DRaaS from an insurance policy to a business enabler.
Sponsored by Quorum
About Quorum
QuorumLabs, Inc. is headquartered in San Jose CA with offices all around the world. Quorum “Disaster Recovery as a Service” (DRaaS) solutions provide organizations with both local and remote instant recovery capabilities for their servers, applications and data. Quorum onQ provides the fastest on premises backup and recovery appliance combined with the most flexible DRaaS in the industry. This hybrid approach allows Quorum customers to enjoy high performance and cloud scale in a single product. To learn more, visit www.quorum.com/product for details.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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