Development work, migration projects, upgrades and testing can now be done without the risk of impacting production systems, thus increasing IT resiliency for businesses. Being able to quickly switch from a production system to a DR system and back again as either a file, VM or complete system level dampens the severity of mistakes and failures to a point where IT downtime will not be felt by organisations or, indeed, their customers.
Plan B is harnessing the new functionality of Zerto 5.5, providing orchestrated failover to a DR system in the Azure cloud. Previously, customers could easily replicate their systems into Azure and failover to these recovery systems with ease, but trying to get their updated data/systems back out of Azure was challenging. This resulted in a reluctance to failover to disaster recovery systems unless the failure was great enough to cease productivity. Now that Zerto has released orchestrated failback from Azure, customers can easily revert back from Azure to their production systems, saving them from prolonged Azure costs and time-consuming migration projects.
“This allows customers to essentially flip to and from Azure to utilise all, or parts of their DR solution for testing and development work, in addition to temporary usage following an outage of production systems”, said Tim Dunger, Director at Plan B Disaster Recovery. “The trick is, understanding how to get your production system Azure-ready and to maintain it correctly in a way so that when you failover to Azure your DR system is ready for service. That’s where our expertise comes in.”
Azure offers companies the benefits of the cloud, including pay-as-you-use pricing, meaning that costly DR site expenses are removed and replaced with costs directly linked to usage. Also on offer is unlimited scalability covering worldwide locations so that customers can be flexible in terms of how much data they store and where they store it, and a 30-day history of data.
Zerto’s continuous replication tool offers near-zero data loss with data replications occurring as often as every 6 seconds, meaning that customers always have an up-to-date copy of their production systems on standby.
Plan B’s managed Azure DR service offers customers the expert knowledge of Zerto’s integration with Azure, with automated testing of the entire DR solution to application level every 24 hours. This advanced API development takes away the manual testing and configuration work that comes with testing Zerto in-house to the application layer. Zerto’s in-built testing protocol will check that the VMs are there, but won’t check the integrity of the DR platform, the applications themselves or that the databases mount correctly, among other things. Plan B’s unique testing technology offers companies daily certification of their DR for compliance purposes and a recovery guarantee, which promises that businesses will be back to business as usual in the fastest time possible (within just a few minutes). Making all this work in Azure requires in-depth expertise.
“The whole idea is that customers shouldn’t feel the impact of IT downtime in this day and age. There are some excellent technologies out there, but they need to be harnessed in the right way, in a way that can improve IT resilience – not just reduce downtime which by now should be a thing of the past,” continued Dunger. “Azure’s price point helps to bring IT resilience to the mass market – not just those that can afford it, as you’re essentially paying for what you use. Plan B customers can benefit from cost efficiencies and improved performance.”
