Connectria and Veeam’s Disaster Recovery Solution

Connectria has partnered with VEEAM to give customers a cost-effective Disaster Recovery Solution. With over 216,500 customers and an industry-leading customer satisfaction score, VEEAM has evolved into a driver of next-generation Availability technology for virtual, physical and cloud-based workloads. They have protected over 12.5 million servers, gain 3,500 plus customers a month, and have been in business for 10 years.

Our partnership provides organizations virtual environments with high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, and complete visibility. An example of our combined solution includes a complete HA production environment located in one of our data centers (e.g. St. Louis) along with a DR environment leveraging VEEAM Backup and Replication in a separately located data center (e.g. Dallas). On a daily basis, your data is replicated and sent through a virtual private network (VPN) to our DR solution, so in the event of a disaster, your data is recovered.

The following questions about disaster recovery are commonly asked by customers. If you are interested in a disaster recovery solution, these answers may help.

What’s the difference between high availability and disaster recovery?

High-Availability is generally referred to as an architectural or application-level redundancy that is typically confined to a single data center site. For example, you may build your application stack on a Highly-Available virtualized infrastructure to add resiliency in the event of a hardware failure, or you may select to duplicate and load balance all of the application VMs so if one fails you have a running instance to take overproduction.

Disaster Recovery is a Planned Failover of a Data Center Site at the time of a Disaster Event. This can be something as simple as a DNS change to a warm site in another geographic area or something as complex as a Geographically Load Balanced Hot Site that will instantly assume the load of the primary production site in a Disaster.

What happens in the event of a disaster?

Disaster Recovery Solutions are designed to meet specific needs at the time of a crisis. Understandably, it is nearly impossible to plan for every possible scenario where your environment could be degraded or inaccessible during the event. Each solution is different. There are some commonalities with all DR solutions:

• The DR Solution will have pre-planned services in place or easily spun up. In most cases, this is a warm site that has the following:
  • Replication services from the primary (production) site. This can be instantaneous, hourly or daily.
  • Hardware, storage and networking services
  • DNS changes
  • Failover and testing capabilities
  • Constant management of failover rules, replication strategy, and data validation
• The DR Solution will have a mechanism for triggering the DR failover, and this should be tested on a regular basis.
• The DR solution will have the ability to fail-back once the primary DC is back online and available for use.
• The DR Solution should NOT rely on services to be built at the time of the event. There are many reasons why the system could not be built in this type of scenario.

Why would I want disaster recovery?

Disaster Recovery (and High-Availability for that matter) is really a form of insurance. You must decide, based on your business model and the expectation of services from your customer, whether the loss of data or loss of use of that data, will negatively impact your business and if so, for how long. This is commonly expressed in terms of Objectives called the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and The Recovery Time Objective (RTO). While similar, these two Objectives help to identify the level of DR you should employ. RPO is essentially the calculated amount of time your business can survive without the data you need to run the business. So if you decide that you can go a day without your data in the failed data center, you would have a 24-hour RPO. The RTO is the amount of time that can elapse from the time you start to raise your services in the DR site and the time they actually come online and can be used as production services.

So once you decide you are failing over to DT, how much time do you have to get the preserved data online? For some companies, this is weeks. For others like banks, financial institutions, and critical healthcare services, this could be minutes.

Contact Connectria if you have any questions about our solutions, VEEAM, or disaster recovery.