You’re protected with simple, low-cost BlueXP disaster recovery

Disaster recovery shouldn’t be about “waiting for the worst.” – a natural disaster, a ransomware attack, or the unknown. Done right, it's about taking control, planning ahead, and making sure that the unthinkable doesn't ever become your reality. Unfortunately, most disaster recovery solutions on the market today are complex and costly, leading to a “least favorite task” mentality that can compromise the business.

That’s why we’re excited to announce that NetApp^® BlueXP™ disaster recovery is now generally available. This new service offers simple, low-cost disaster protection for VMware workloads from on premises to a VMware Cloud backed by Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. We’re also extending the service to include support for on-premises to on-premises disaster recovery, which is now in public preview and will be generally available soon.

Cost continues to be a significant barrier to implementing a disaster recovery plan. Traditional approaches required duplicate infrastructure, redundant data centers, and dedicated IT personnel. The upfront capital expenditure and ongoing maintenance costs associated with these solutions are prohibitive for many organizations, especially small and medium-sized enterprises. It was time for a proven, reliable disaster recovery service that didn’t require that redundant cost structure in order to be secure against disaster.

Ensuring the reliability and performance of a disaster recovery plan is crucial. The solution must be capable of seamless failover, minimal data loss, and rapid recovery. Achieving this level of reliability and performance can be challenging, because it requires robust infrastructure, efficient data replication mechanisms, and continuous testing to validate the effectiveness of the plan. With decades of implementing industry-leading business continuity solutions for our customers, we felt that it was time to provide a consumption-based disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution.

BlueXP disaster recovery tackles these challenges head on. This new capability of BlueXP provides simple, low-cost disaster protection for your VMware workloads with intuitive, guided disaster recovery failover/fallback workflows. NetApp is an innovator in providing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) disaster recovery solution that significantly lowers cost and complexity and also enables reliable, ongoing, nondisruptive recovery testing.

BlueXP disaster recovery is fast because it takes advantage of NetApp SnapMirror® technology, which includes deduplication, compression, and compaction, along with block-level operation, greatly minimizing the amount of data that needs to pass between systems. This technology slashes costs, data transfer time, and system overhead.

SnapMirror is proven in thousands of customer organizations, with instant data transfers and application-consistent recovery. Customers get the tightest recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) in the industry.

The service uses the NetApp BlueXP SaaS-delivered control plane with its intuitive UI, simplified deployment, and easy-to-implement automation templates that can manage both on-premises and cloud environments. The simple, nondisruptive disaster recovery testing capability allows frequent readiness drills that increase confidence. These automated workflows give you an “easy button” for attaining DR readiness that can be validated on an ongoing basis. You can be confident in your ability to respond if disaster strikes.

Whether your recovery site is another on-premises location or uses the VMware Cloud service, you can leverage the same VMware operational dynamics so that your processes, runbooks, and procedures don’t need to change. This means that when disaster strikes you don’t have to learn a new environment with different methods and tools. That’s a big relief for your staff in your most stressful time. The service’s automated, nondisruptive disaster recovery drills give your team confidence in the failover/failback steps that might be needed—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 RPOs and RTOs for VMware workload disaster recovery get you back in business fast.

When you’re using a VMware Cloud target, BlueXP disaster recovery doesn’t require you to provision dedicated, alternative infrastructure “on standby” in a second data center, which substantially reduces the cost of your DR solution. BlueXP further reduces costs by exploiting SnapMirror technology, which preserves NetApp 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.

BlueXP disaster recovery supports both on premises and VMware Cloud on AWS targets.

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 failover if a disaster occurs.
• Monitor active disaster recovery operations.
• Failback post recovery to the (restored) primary site for normal operations.

Take this guided tour to experience how easy it is to go through all these steps.

We are excited about this new capability, and we encourage you to get started today.

Get started with BlueXP disaster recovery now.