If you look back to the previous blog post about disaster recovery for enterprise remote and branch offices (ROBO), including brick and mortar retail and regional locations, we explored how essential these ROBO sites are to allow customers to do business however they choose, anywhere, anytime. But managing and protecting the data across multiple sites, systems, and devices can be challenging. And typically, when you are trying to manage multiple sites, one or more may be especially vulnerable to outages.
The Cost of Downtime
If your sites are already at risk, it should be an even bigger priority for the business because the impact from natural and man-made disasters and related downtime incidents are on the rise. It’s a matter of when, not if, downtime will happen. This is, in part, due to the pervasiveness of technology in every part of our society as well as increased frequency of natural disasters.
Disaster related events are on the rise
The fact remains that whether it’s from heavy flooding, human error or application failure, the cost of any downtime is high—in terms of money and reputation.
How high? According to statistica.com, 24% of survey respondents worldwide reported that the hourly cost of critical servers for the average business is between US$301k and US$400k. And significantly, 14% of respondents reported the cost was greater than US$5M.
Simply stated, you can’t afford a weak disaster and recovery plan.
This survey shows that the average hourly cost of enterprise server downtime is between US$300,000 to US$400,00.
Source: Statista - Average cost per hour of enterprise server downtime worldwide
Recovering from downtime
Customers today expect zero downtime. When a site does go down, the business must get up and running quickly, with 100% of the most current application data intact. In addition, every global company needs to be concerned from a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) perspective. These regulations that went into effect in the European Union in May 2018 require careful management of customer data, including regularly deleting expired information. Regulations like these are becoming more common. For example, for years, Healthcare companies can require historical proof of compliance for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations.
Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) are two of the most important parameters of an effective disaster recovery strategy. Defining and documenting these objectives can help you create an optimal business continuity plan.
Remote Office Fast Recovery
So how do you ensure you meet RTOs and RPOs to ensure you have an optimal business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) plan?
Most companies are looking at new, affordable ways to quickly and easily back up and recover large, diverse data sets in complex environments encompassing remote sites in a way that is fast, easy and seamless to the business. Today’s data centers, whether a primary or remote site, are evolving toward a software defined, virtualized hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) that links traditional systems with new cloud-based platforms, such as Nutanix.
The advantage of Nutanix is that it can be consistently deployed across traditional on-premises enterprise data centers, remote and branch offices and disaster recovery (DR) sites, and public clouds. This enables application mobility across the cloud without lock-in to a hardware, hypervisor, or cloud vendor. Nutanix offers flexible consumption models, with remote office solutions available as software-only deployments and from various partners. Remote locations can use Nutanix to run nearly any workload while lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) with faster and streamlined deployments, instant backup and recovery, and simplified management.
One of the benefits in this environment is that if set up correctly, it is scalable and able to recover from any failure within minutes. All of these customers also clearly realize that in addition to protecting for disaster scenarios, the data also needs to be protected for logical corruption and for compliance reasons.
Nutanix customers need a solution that leverages the power of the platform they have invested in and do not want a solution that is trying to create one more silo.
That is where HYCU for Nutanix comes in. It is the only solution that:
- Leverages storage level snapshots for both backup and recovery
- Supports all of the hypervisors that customers care about, i.e. AHV & ESX, and
- Eliminates the need for a separate infrastructure for rapid recovery and prevents your VMs from locking up (“VM stun”), which ensures high performance.
Remember: Disaster recovery is NOT the same as replication alone
Backup and disaster recovery strategies are beginning to blur—but don’t make the mistake and assume that replication alone is an effective disaster recovery and business continuity strategy, especially when it comes to your ROBO sites. If you solely rely on replication, you run the risk when one site is corrupted of replicating corrupted data between sites.
From our perspective, your ROBO site should be as easy to manage as your central location. The same one-click recovery you expect because you have invested in Nutanix as your platform of choice, should extend to your ROBO environment. You can do this with HYCU for Nutanix. And there is no ROBO staff required, no additional ROBO infrastructure required and no additional bandwidth required. This is what we call WAN-free backup.
This in turn makes your BCDR strategy:
- Elegant
- Efficient, and
- Extremely cost-effective
Conclusion
As we recommend with all our customers, the proof is in the hands-on use. We currently offer a 45-day free trial. No commitment. No obligation. We’re sure you’ll find, as have all our customers, that there is no better data protection to complement your Nutanix ROBO investment than HYCU for Nutanix.
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