The rise in capability and popularity of cloud computing has had the fortunate outcome of providing new tools and approaches to solving age-old problems. One such persistent pain point is that of disaster recovery.
The complexity and expense commonly associated with disaster recovery solutions had once relegated them to use by large enterprises with the budget and operational expertise to employ them. Mid-sized and smaller organizations were left to make do with less capable tools that fit within their budgets.
Through the use of a creative software platform, local and cloud-based infrastructure, Infrascale aims to change the landscape and make disaster recovery obtainable by masses in the form of Infrascale Disaster Recovery – Cloud.
Both Experiencing and Protecting Against IT Disasters is an Expensive Affair
Historically, disaster recovery solutions have been plagued by the expense of required hardware and software, as well as the complexity of initial configuration and ongoing operation. In some cases, executing a successful failover could require the operations team to follow a lengthy DR runbook and supplement the capabilities of the DR solution with custom scripts.
These constraints, among others, tended to make successful use of these solutions possible for only those organizations with the right skills and ample budgets.
The problem with this approach is that the need to recover from a disaster is not one limited to larger organizations. Nearly every business has an interest in the resilience of their revenue-generating applications, and the needs of more moderately sized businesses should not be overlooked by the marketplace.
Infrascale Provides Simplified, Cloud-Based IT Resilience to the Masses
In contrast to more traditional disaster recovery solutions requiring large amounts of infrastructure, Infrascale takes a simplified approach with Infrascale Disaster Recovery Cloud (IDR-Cloud).
At its core, the IDR-Cloud solution consists of the Infrascale software platform, along with a pair of appliances dedicated to storing user-replicated data. The primary appliance, in either physical or virtual form, can be placed in the customer’s own on-premises data center and used to quickly instantiate system replicas using the compute and storage present in the appliance.
This approach protects against partial site failure where primary infrastructure may be impacted, but not the overall hosting facility. To protect against full site failure, Infrascale also replicates data to an offsite secondary virtual appliance that can reside within the cloud provider of the customer’s choice.
Using this offsite data and nested virtualization, customer workloads can be instantiated on one of several supported public cloud platforms (including AWS, Azure, or GCP) or even Infrascale’s own hosting platform.
In both local and cloud failover scenarios, users can leverage the integrated orchestration tools to define important elements like application groupings and boot parameters to ensure a smooth failover is achieved. Combined with integrated DR testing capabilities, IDR-Cloud circumvents much of the complexity that made DR such a challenge in the past.
Conclusion
As many customers have experienced to this point, both experiencing disastrous events and protecting against them can be painful and expensive. And, to some extent, the industry has resisted the evolution needed to bring simplified disaster recovery to the mainstream.
Infrascale has responded to this by providing a feature-rich platform for protecting against partial and full site failures using a combination of local and cloud resources.
With an overall increase in several core capabilities and reduction of complexity compared to more traditional DR solutions, the average customer finally gets a win in their column.
To hear more about Infrascale and their approach to IT Resilience, check out their presentation at Storage Field Day 19.
