Disaster recovery infrastructure

March 27, 2024

Orest Lesyuk

StarWind VTL Product Manager. Orest possesses vast expertise in virtualization technologies, storage, data protection, and infrastructure architecture.

Introduction

While backups and disaster recovery (DR) might seem similar, they serve two different goals. Backups are intended to safeguard your data from ransomware and provide the ability to restore data from weeks, months or even years back, depending on your retention settings. DR is intended to recover your mission-critical VMs as fast as possible to restore your business operation if a disaster happens to the main production environment.

Problem

While data protection software usually provides both disaster recovery and backup capabilities, these usually require separate dedicated hardware, forcing businesses to choose one or another, especially when budgets are limited. DR requires a dedicated hardware with storage that is fast enough to meet the required Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for VMs recovery.

Moreover, a DR appliance needs sufficient CPU and RAM resources and a hypervisor to make sure that the mission-critical VMs are running smoothly as if they were on a production cluster.

Solution

StarWind Backup and DR Appliance works together with industry-standard data protection software to combine both backup and local disaster recovery capabilities within a single appliance. It ensures extremely fast DR to meet even the strictest RTO and RPO requirements thanks to NVMe storage backend.

It matches your production hypervisor (VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V) and has enough RAM and CPU resources to restore your mission-critical VMs and run them smoothly directly on the appliance.

Conclusion

StarWind Backup and DR Appliance uses all bits of hardware and software to their full potential, eliminating the need to choose between backups and DR. It serves both by providing backup storage and ability to restore VMs directly on the appliance. StarWind Backup and DR Appliance works with industry-standard data protection software to provide backup and DR functionality while ensuring extremely fast restores due to NVMe storage backend, a smart combination of a hypervisor of your choice and the necessary compute resources to ensure smooth operation of the most important VMs.