BlueXP: You're protected with the “easy button” for disaster recovery
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Richard Treadway
Enterprise workloads are the engines that drive businesses—and they need to be able to do that regardless of failure, disaster, or human error. That’s why we’re excited to announce that the new NetApp® BlueXP™ disaster recovery service is now available in public preview. This new service provides simple, low-cost disaster protection for VMware workloads from on-premises to on-premises NetApp ONTAP® environments or to VMware Cloud when using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. BlueXP helps you prepare for a disaster--and it dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of your disaster recovery solution.
Enterprises recognize that having a proven, reliable disaster recovery plan is critical to their business viability. With today’s global challenges, it’s an absolute imperative to be able to recover easily and rapidly from any form of disaster. Yet most disaster recovery solutions are admittedly complex and costly. As a result, even forward-thinking organizations that have implemented disaster recovery plans find that the recovery phase can be difficult, time consuming, and suboptimal, potentially resulting in significant downtime—and often requiring specialized and seldom-used skills.
BlueXP sets the bar as a DR-as-a-service offering that delivers simple, low-cost disaster protection for your VMware workloads from on-premises to on-premises ONTAP environments or to VMware Cloud and FSx for ONTAP with intuitive, guided disaster recover failover/fallback workflows. NetApp is an innovator in providing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) disaster recovery solution that not only significantly lowers cost and complexity but enables reliable, ongoing, nondisruptive recovery testing.
Simplified DR planning and execution
BlueXP disaster recovery is integrated into the SaaS-delivered BlueXP control plane for simplified deployment, replication, and administration across on-premises and cloud environments. It simplifies disaster recovery workflows from on-premises to on-premises ONTAP datastores or to FSx for ONTAP through easy-to-follow DR templates for guided failover and failback operations. These automated workflows give you an “easy button” for attaining DR readiness through frequent, simple DR drills to test failover. You can be confident in your ability to respond if disaster strikes.
Low-cost disaster protection for critical VMware workloads
BlueXP disaster recovery when using a VMware Cloud target doesn’t require you to provision dedicated, alternative infrastructure “on standby” in a second data center, so you substantially reduce the cost of your DR solution. BlueXP further reduces costs by exploiting NetApp SnapMirror® technology, which preserves ONTAP storage efficiencies (deduplication, compression, and compaction) to provide the smallest storage footprint. Additionally, NetApp’s industry-leading block-level, incremental-forever technology keeps bandwidth resource requirements low to reduce network and storage costs.
DR plan with high confidence of recovery from failure
The service’s automated disaster recovery drills can be nondisruptive and improve your preparedness without affecting production resources or availability. These drills substantially reduce risk with continuous compliance health checks. Multiple point-in-time recovery points provide granular restore operations for complete flexibility. And with the high performance of SnapMirror, your recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) for VMware workload disaster recovery remain low and predictable.
Let’s take a closer look at the disaster workflow. With BlueXP disaster recovery, you can:
- Create a templatized disaster recovery plan for vSphere apps that are using NFS datastores in ONTAP.
- Replicate vSphere apps and data to on-premises or to a VMware Cloud disaster recovery site in AWS by using proven SnapMirror technology.
- Test the failover process without affecting production workloads.
- Easily fail over if a disaster occurs.
- Monitor active disaster recovery operations.
- Fail back post-recovery to the (restored) primary site for normal operations.
We are very exicited to introduce this new capability and encourage you to get started today.
Richard Treadway
Richard is responsible for BlueXP data protection, which provides backup and disaster recovery for ONTAP systems. Richard has over 30 years of experience developing and marketing complex software products, including the X Window and Motif standards. He holds an MS in computer science from the University of Vermont and a BA in sociology from Alfred University.
