In June, our Head of Pre-Sales, Anthony Doncaster, and Level 3 Cloud Engineer, Dan Miller, took a day out of their usual schedules to work on a Proof of Concept environment with VMware, for our new Cloud DR solution, built on the new vCloud Availability technology.
The VMware vCloud Availability (vCAV) technology allows us to offer native Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) for VMware-based platforms, as either a bolt-on service to our Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) customers or for anyone with VMware infrastructure on their site or in a data centre.
Leveraging vCAV technology, Secura’s Cloud DR solution will provide simple and cost-effective disaster recovery protection for any VMware workloads.
Using vSphere Replication, vCloud Availability enables near instant recovery of protected virtual machines from our VPC infrastructure and will be a great value-add for anyone with critical web applications.
Our in-house VMware experts Anthony Doncaster and Dan Miller worked on a proof of concept for the vCloud Availability (vCAV) product on our VPC platform with the help of VMware professionals, Alex Tanner and Tomas Fojta.
Alex is the Lead System Engineer at VMware and is a network, storage, server and virtualisation technical specialist with a wealth of experience in the cloud technology market.
Tomas is a certified virtualisation and cloud architect at VMware and is well known in the VMware community for his blog about virtualisation and cloud computing. So, it was fantastic to have Alex and Tom’s specific VMware experience and expertise to assist with the set-up of vCAV onto our VPC platform.
The team of four completed the proof of concept set-up within the day, working together to install the new technology onto our VPC infrastructure ready for us to roll-out our Cloud DR solution to customers.
In the video below, Anthony Doncaster talks about the new vCAV technology and how it will benefit our customers, from cost-effective DR, lower RPO and RTO, sandbox testing and simple management through the Secura web portal.
Special thanks to Alex Tanner and Tomas Fojta at VMware for taking the time to offer their expertise and assist with the vCAV setup.
Click the header above for the full text transcript of the this video.
Anthony Doncaster, Head of Pre-Sales, Secura:
I’m Anthony Doncaster. I’m the Head of Pre-Sales here at Secura. So today we’re working on a proof of concept for a product called vCloud Availability which is an add-on product to our VPC services which will allow us to do disaster recovery as a service inbound and outbound to our VPC platform from customers on-premise. The particular technology that it uses is VSphere replication which is something that is available to all VMware customers if they’ve got an on-premise VMware installation, basically. So it will allow us to leverage their existing licensing with some additional features on our VPC to allow them to do very easy DR to the Cloud, not only for disaster recovery as a service but also for inbound migrations as well which will be very useful as a technology for us.
So currently with our VPC, we’re able to do remote backups and image capture of virtual machines, but this is more of a replication, so the RPO and the RTO are very, very much lower, so currently, we’ll back up a virtual machine remotely and then we’ll restore that back up onto the VPC.
It’s very flexible as a product in terms of the RPO you can set so you can do anything from several hours down to 15 minutes and also you can set it to do point in time copies as well. So you can also restore specific versions of the VM, not just the latest version as well.
The client side, there’s very little additional to do. It’s just installing the VSphere replication appliances and then on our side, it is a bit more involved which is why the proof of concept is very important. But it does leverage existing technologies that we use.
For clients with an on-premise VMware solution, it offers a really straightforward way of getting disaster recovery to the cloud with some really low RPO and RTO times. In terms of failing over or test failovers for the virtual machines, there’s a customer portal that they can log into and basically if their site is unavailable, they could always log in and restore those virtual machines on the VPC through the secure portal, but also they could do sandbox testing as well so they don’t have to do a full failover to test the failover. You could do a non-disruptive test failover so all your on-premise stuff is still running, but you could log into the portal and bring up your virtual machines in a sandbox to make sure that they all come up properly, test your RPO and RTO settings.
If you have any questions or would like to find out more about vCloud Availability and our new Cloud DR solution, get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.
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