Disaster Recovery as a Service

What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?

In an increasingly digital world, data availability and protection are crucial. Because of this reliance on IT, even a short interruption can have major consequences. Interruptions can have infrastructural causes (such as hardware failure, power outages, or fire), but more often they are the result of cyberattacks (such as ransomware and hacks) or simply human error. To protect your cloud against all scenarios, Fundaments offers Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). DRaaS is a service that protects your infrastructure, applications, and data by storing them at a separate location.

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The disaster recovery environment

Disaster Recovery as a Service is based on creating an exact copy of your company's business-critical application landscape. Should the primary environment become unreachable due to a disaster, you can easily fall back on the failover environment to continue working as usual. This makes DRaaS from Fundaments an essential part of your Business Continuity Plan (BCP).

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Data loss (RPO) and recovery time (RTO)

The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) determine the extent of data loss and the speed of service restoration, respectively, following an incident: the 'disaster'.

The amount of data loss is determined by the point in time to which you can roll back, calculated from the moment of the incident. With Fundaments DRaaS solutions, this can be customized from a matter of seconds or minutes up to several days. The underlying technology uses a log (referred to as a journal) allowing the production environment to write changes directly to the failover site. This method can be utilized for up to two weeks. If a longer retention period is required, we recommend our Backup as a Service (BaaS) offering. Looking at the RTO, Fundaments DRaaS solutions provide a turn-key standby environment. All data is synchronized with the disaster recovery site, and compute capacity is readily available to launch your workloads. Applications and workloads are brought back online in the failover environment within minutes of initiating the disaster recovery process.

Fundaments offers two different DRaaS solutions, which can also be used in combination. The specific configuration depends on your RTO and RPO requirements.

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Fundaments' disaster recovery services

Fundaments provides two disaster recovery services: Zerto Virtual Replication and VMware Cloud Director Availability. Both DRaaS solutions are fully integrated with Fundaments IaaS services. This means that recovering an environment—whether for testing or during an actual failover—can be performed in a fully automated manner. By simply hitting the "red button," any environment can fail over to the most recent recovery point. From there, the software automatically takes care of attaching workloads to the correct network, re-IPing, and powering them on in the proper sequence. This tight level of integration makes the service exceptionally easy to configure and operate.

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Zerto Virtual Replication

Zerto is an industry-leading player when it comes to DRaaS. Backed by years of experience in delivering a cloud-agnostic solution, Zerto Virtual Replication is the most versatile failover solution on the market. It supports both Hyper-V and VMware vSphere across private clouds, while also enabling seamless migration to public clouds such as Azure and AWS.

Failover management is handled via an online portal, accessible through the Fundaments Customer Portal. In this portal, you can configure workloads and view the current RPO. You can also initiate a failover from here, either in test mode or for an actual failover. The simplicity of the portal ensures both clear visibility into the current status and easy management.

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VMware Cloud Director Availability

VMware Cloud Director Availability is a DRaaS solution dedicated to delivering disaster recovery for the VMware vSphere platform. Deeply integrated into the Cloud Director management portal, it offers exceptional ease of use. The achievable RPO with this solution is 1 minute, meaning potential data loss is limited to just 60 seconds. This solution is also frequently leveraged to migrate from existing on-premises vSphere platforms to Fundaments IaaS.

Just like with Zerto Virtual Replication, you can set up DR protection for each virtual server. You can configure the RPO and add retention, allowing you to fall back on earlier recovery points. This option is often used to recover in the event of a ransomware scenario.

Additionally, you can add a configuration for a test scenario, allowing you to fully test the setup without impacting your services. This functionality is available as standard. Thanks to its seamless integration with Fundaments IaaS, VMware Cloud Director Availability offers an accessible solution for implementing DRaaS, especially when RPO requirements are measured in minutes rather than seconds.

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Zerto Virtual Replication or VMware Cloud Director Availability?

Fundaments advises on which DRaaS solution best fits your implementation. As a rule of thumb, Zerto Virtual Replication is the choice when RPO requirements are less than a minute, or when there is a difference in virtualization technology between the source and failover platforms. Zerto Virtual Replication is also the preferred choice when failover to hyperscalers like AWS and Azure is required.

VMware Cloud Director Availability is best suited for standard disaster recovery needs based on VMware vSphere. If an RPO of 5 minutes is acceptable, this solution is a great fit.

The DRaaS service accommodates multiple deployment scenarios. The most common is Cloud-to-Cloud DRaaS, where both primary and failover environments reside within Fundaments IaaS. Another widely adopted scenario is failing over from an on-site office location to Fundaments IaaS: this is known as on-premises-to-cloud DRaaS. It delivers robust disaster recovery capabilities without requiring heavy capital investments in dedicated hardware.

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High-quality data center locations

Fundaments DRaaS is delivered entirely from a Dutch cloud platform, distributed across seven data center facilities in the eastern, central, and western regions of the Netherlands. All primary data center facilities are Tier 3+ certified, the highest standard currently achievable for a Dutch data center. Tier 3+ facilities leave nothing to chance when it comes to security and resilience, featuring redundant power supplies, advanced intrusion detection, flood and fire protection, and climate control.